Business model for Twitter?

This is not the official model by any stretch of the imagination, but over the weekend I was thinking about some of the ways that one might define a social networking site, thinking that the key part of any SNS is that the user gets to be themselves and “freely” gives of themselves as they post updates and other data to the system. I say freely because someone is obviously making money from all that data – Facebook is certainly not suffering based on this model, but what about Twitter? Even though it is basic, Twitter counts as a SNS as users post about themselves, and as it is still a bit geeky, users have no issue using usernames as opposed to “real names” (note, you still have to sign into Facebook et al via an email address – ala user@provider.domain).

So what is this business model that I was thinking about? Well the idea came to me when I kept getting time outs on my ad free mobile Twitter apps, twibble and twitterberry but I was able to use the ad incorporating m.slandr.net to post. I figured that if there was going to be a business model that would not disrupt the tweeting ethos, the way to do it would be to sell “api calls” or what have you (I don’t know if this is actually the case now). So if you want to be a startup, you are allowed say 500,000 calls to the system/hour for free – this encourages startups and keeps the soil turning to pull out new ideas. For some additional money, a developer can up the number of calls to one million. To cover those fees, the developer could sell ads or subscriptions, or keep it free for their users by selling their data (of yeah, people think there is such a thing as pricavy in the twitterverse??) buy mining tweets via a search engine or enmass in some manner. In the later model, the system stays free to the user and depending on the data mining tools the developer could buy an enormous number of api calls to let their users just hammer on the system to their heart’s content. Hopefully this would not take down smaller developers (think tradgey of the commons). And this is the model that I spotted over my tweetstream this weekend with be-a-magpie. I don’t think I’ll sign up on that service any time soon, but I’m sure there are going to be some who do.