[Updated] Twitter’s Business Model Can Be Dead Simple. And It Doesn’t Have to Piss Tweeps Off.

Yay business accounts and all that, this article isn’t a dig at them.

Heck, I’ll probably get one if Twitter will let me pay for real estate on prominent parts of the site in order to increase my visibility.

I wouldn’t want to be cluttering up Twitter, but if you ask me that new definitions spot is the perfect place for a suggested “suggest people to follow” spot, if it was based on whatever interests I chose to share.

But I don’t think that’s going to be Twitter’s most successful business model. Why not?

I just said it. Companies aren’t just interested in 20 more characters or other power features.

We business owners want what we always want: targeted exposure to our key demographics, but in a way that engages them, because we know that if we engage them, they’ll come back.

And if they come back, they may begin to trust us. If they trust us, they’ll subscribe, which may lead to sales. Engagement is important to us, not just ad space. And Twitter should be selling some version of that to us.

I was just reading an article that asks a superb question: Is Twitter Killing RSS?”

The author Jeff Nolan says:

Something interesting happened along the way, Twitter achieved critical mass and bloggers and mainstream media alike adopted it to promote content. Every post I write is automatically tweeted out with the post title and link to source, not unlike what other sites do, and over the last year I have noticed a steady increase in referral traffic from Twitter as my followers grew and links to my posts were clicked on… in essence people are following me much like they subscribe to my RSS feed.

Of course, I don’t think Twitter is killing RSS… yet. I will agree that I get much more of my RSS headlines from Twitter – if you’re not on Twitter, I don’t read your headlines until I get to my RSS feed. My day starts Gmail, Facebook, Twitter. I keep all three open all day.

I do NOT keep my Google reader open for more than half an hour if I get to it each day.

That’s not to say that I think RSS should die as a technology. I just think that, like HTML, we should never, ever, have to touch it, see it, tweak it, explain it, as publishers.

The book I wrote on RSS in 2005 years ago should not still be relevant today. We’re too “close” to RSS. It should be two degrees from us, just like web pages are two degrees from us, via things like search, visual editors, and the web browser. Email is two degrees from us, via the online or offline mail client, filtering, spam-catching technology, and whatever the compose email button does that makes me able to write an email without knowing anything about mail headers.

RSS is still one degree from us. And that’s too close. There’s no just add water element to the use of RSS in our daily lives as publishers, or as consumers. If I want the headlines of another site, I have to know what an RSS feed is, so I can find it and add it to my reader, even if I use Google Reader. If I’m a publisher and I want people to know about my RSS feed, I have to know all the steps of implementation.

And yet if I want people to know I have a website, all I need to say is “www blahblahblah dot com”. If that.

Here’s part of the comment I left at Jeff’s site, which further explains my point:

The problem with RSS is that it’s not the *point*. RSS is the enabling technology for tweeting our links, it shouldn’t be something we have to interact with directly to receive information. It’s the same thing with HTML… can you imagine if we had to scan through HTML in order to read sites? Or if we had to have a tool between us and the browser just to read the browser?

There’s the problem with RSS readers, right there.

In the early adopter days, yes, it’s to be expected that we’d need to know what that little orange button was. And okay, we had to educate our userbase on RSS until we could tell them to subscribe via Google, Yahoo, myAOL, etc. Then when RSS to email came along, lots of us sang hallelujah and put the subscribe via email box up for the people who preferred to digest that way.

But now, today? Why is there still the middle layer? Why do I still need to put the button up and tell people what RSS is?

Okay, enough venting. Let me get to my idea for Twitter’s business model.

The problem for both publishers and users of RSS is : we don’t want that middle layer of the RSS subscription vehicle. We want to receive news where we already are without having to do the techie bit like finding the feed, deciding on RSS or Atom, full feed or short. Not when we have things like Twitter. We want to see a headline and click a link, and know that tomorrow’s headlines will come through while we browsing tools we already use.

The solution:  Add a tool to Twitter between us and the enabling technology by which we receive the information we want even if that site isn’t using Twitter.

The business model: Paid listings as well as natural ones. It worked for Google, didn’t it?

And I know what you’re thinking, it will clutter up Twitter.

Not necessarily. There’s real estate on the home page where the testimonials are, at the bottom.

The new Twitter design has created that space that everyone already believes is for ads.

I say take it one step beyond that. Either as a slide-in panel or using some of that blank space on the right under the Trending Topics, give me the scrolling headlines of the sites I choose to subscribe to – let them scroll in by time. Pay for listings there too, make it find me more stuff I’d be interested in.

Make it really sophisticated and sensitive to spam-attempts by putting me in complete control of the rankings. The default would be that they come in by time. But I can prioritize or de-prioritize a site’s headlines based on my preferences. That way, it’s not a model that can be cheated. The publisher still has to work hard to engage me past the headline, paid listing or not.

In tools that use the Twitter API, you coulc integrate these extra listings into the timeline so they show up for everyone who wants the option on – perhaps even make it a timeline you can toggle on and off. Anyone who didn’t want their headlines mixed in with their timeline updates could opt out. But would they really want to?

If you could get your friends updates and your RSS updates in one streaming flow of information, so that if you wanted to, you could see just your friends, or just the news, or both, wouldn’t that be cool – even useful?

Add a more organized way to sort favorites so you could save stuff to reference later and man…

Why would I need Google Reader?

Sites get traffic, people get access to their favorite sites, Twitter makes money – win, win-win. Anyone who doesn’t like it, opts out.  For a fee new sites can get listed under suggested resources that could dig through what we like IF we opted into it, and offer us more choices.

Why not give us more of what we love about Twitter, and cash in on that?

That’s my challenge to ALL of social media – why do all of you keep trying to add the layer of traditional marketing back on top of this new breed of thing that you are, instead of enhancing what we like best and asking businesses if you can then help them find us? Why Facebook Ads instead of… Facebook Social News?

Why are you guys selling ads instead of selling enhanced engagement?

So, talk to me or click the retweet button.

Am I out of my mind or on to something? Comment moderation is off.

Update: TechCrunch is reporting that there’s a Google-Twitter  acquisition or partnership deal in the works. It’s completely by accident that I happened to write a blog post earlier today that lightly insinuated, in a round about fashion that Google Reader could become obsolete if someone doesn’t find a way to integrate the blog conversation stream with Twitter.

No, really. I swear I don’t know anything.

I mean, just because I said in 2007 that Google should have bought Twitter instead of Jaiku doesn’t mean anything.