Should Twitter charge high-spew users?
Monday, May 26, 2008 by Dave Winer.
Om Malik asks if Twitter should charge users like Scoble who have huge numbers of followers. 
It's a fair question because these users are super-expensive for Twitter, much more so than users with modest numbers of followers.
To get an idea, I have a little agent script that counts and ranks people I have followed in the recent past to get a rough idea of how much work they generate for Twitter's system software.
http://twitter.scripting.com/spewage.html
You can see that Scoble tops the list with a "spew factor" of 308,359,436. I'm #5 with a spew of 77,174,172.
Imho, they shouldn't charge these people because they're feeding the growth of Twitter. If you charge them a competitor will come along and might actually pay them to use their system because it will attract so many other users.
Right now Twitter doesn't need more money. They need a design that works, and an implementation of that design. They have lots of money and can get lots more.
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"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.
Dave Winer, 53, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.
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