Today, Twit­ter founder Biz stone sent out an offi­cial newslet­ter inform­ing all tweep­ers about the new ToS (Terms of Ser­vice). In his e-mail, Biz out­lines that shap­ing the foun­da­tions of Twit­ter is an ongo­ing project:

As Twit­ter has evolved, we’ve gained a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how folks use the service.

The com­plete ToS can be found here, but there is also a post on the offi­cial blog out­lin­ing the most impor­tant prin­ci­ples, which are:

Adver­tis­ing — In the Terms, we leave the door open for adver­tis­ing. We’d like to keep our options open as we’ve said before.
Own­er­ship — Twit­ter is allowed to “use, copy, repro­duce, process, adapt, mod­ify, pub­lish, trans­mit, dis­play and dis­trib­ute” your tweets because that’s what we do. How­ever, they are your tweets and they belong to you.
APIs — The apps that have grown around the Twit­ter plat­form are flour­ish­ing and adding value to the ecosys­tem. You autho­rize us to make con­tent avail­able via our APIs. We’re also work­ing on guide­lines for use of the API.
SPAM — Abu­sive behav­ior and spam is also out­lined in these terms accord­ing to the rules we’ve been oper­at­ing under for some time.

Let’s take a closer look at the first two state­ments: Obvi­ously, the Twit­ter team has a learned a lot from Facebook’s ToS dis­as­ter: when the world’s most pop­u­lar social net­work announced a change in terms of copy­right (“all your media are belong to us”), users started protest­ing imme­di­ately. I think it’s impor­tant to bal­ance two issues here: on the one hand, the ser­vice provider needs to be “in the clear” when it comes to (re)-distributing con­tent, on the other hand, users like to “own” their stuff, at least on paper — so Twit­ter has found a pretty ele­gant solu­tion for this situation.

The part about adver­tis­ing is even more inter­est­ing: at some point, Twit­ter has to gen­er­ate cash, and there are gen­er­ally only two ways to achieve this: adver­tis­ing or a pre­mium aka paid ser­vice. Twit­ter has been quite reluc­tant about intro­duc­ing paid accounts — plus, there are already two com­pa­nies which try to “3rd-party-monetize” the ser­vice: Mag­pie and Spon­soredTweets (I will not link the two ser­vice here as both are crap, at least for Euro­pean users: Spon­soredTweets doesn’t have any outside-US offers and Mag­pie doesn’t gen­er­ate any money. So I highly rec­om­mend *not* using any of them).

These plat­forms offer Twit­ter whales — micro blog­gers with more than 10k fol­low­ers — some cash for spam­ming their fol­low­ers. Nat­u­rally, this busi­ness model hasn’t got them a lot of fans. But just imag­ine Twit­ter start­ing “offi­cial” adver­tis­ing: they lit­er­ally do have direct access to mil­lions of users, which are per­fectly tar­geted in terms of inter­ests, loca­tion and lan­guage: I think Twit­ter cre­ated an enor­mous value for the adver­tis­ing indus­try and if they really open the door for paid Tweets (or pro­file ads), it will lead to a sta­ble income model. Maybe they’ll even intro­duce paid accounts (pro­nounce: ad-free) at the same time — I’d pay for Twit­ter any day, with or with­out ads. What’s your opin­ion on the future of paid tweets?

Related posts:

1. Epic fail: Why is twit­ter walling the reply-garden?
2. datadirt updates via twit­ter: @datadirtrss
3. Microblogging-Ad-Time: Mag­pie sells tweet attention
4. The Twit­ter Auto-Follow accounts list…
5. Mr. Tweet: find those like-minded folks