Marketing exec Ian Schafer has gotten folks talking (in particular, over at Mashable) about his move to sell his Twitter background on eBay. This is clearly an experiment, as much as I like following Ian on Twitter, I doubt his pageviews support anything other than a super endemic, non scalable campaign. That said, it got me thinking, how might Twitter make money? It’s got the attention of a lot of people. But it’s also got the Facebook problem – millions of hours of attention, fractured in millions of ways. Not exactly the one to many model so loved by traditional approaches to marketing. I pinged Evan Williams and he said his focus was not on figuring out this problem at the moment (and I am certain that is the right answer – after all, he’s got other oceans to boil).
For me, one answer to the Facebook problem was the launch of the platform. That provided cool applications and services that started to feel like publications – Watercooler, Graffiti, etc. And Twitter has so much potential. Perhaps it should launch a platform as well….