Updated 6/20/09 1:20 p.m.: Clarified Todd Chaffee’s position on Twitter’s board.
Someday, when you ask your Twitter followers to recommend the most comfortable running shoe or the best digital camera, you might be able to go one step further and buy the product on the Twitter site.
E-commerce, including links to products and turnkey payment mechanisms, is a likely revenue stream for Twitter, said Todd Chaffee, a Twitter board observer and general partner at Institutional Venture Partners, which has invested in Twitter. That gives us one more hint about how Twitter will make money.
Mr. Chaffee said that we can also expect Twitter to offer filters and feeds to sort tweets by whom they are from and what they are about.
Many companies are already on Twitter, monitoring what customers say about them and offering discounts and promotions to their followers. And many people use Twitter to ask for recommendations, like which type of gadget to buy or which movie to see. Since Twitter is already becoming one of the best shopping resources, Mr. Chaffee said, why not enable people to make purchases from the site as well?
“Commerce-based search businesses monetize extremely well, and if someone says, ‘What treadmill should I buy?’ you as the treadmill company want to be there,” Mr. Chaffee said. “As people use Twitter to get trusted recommendations from friends and followers on what to buy, e-commerce navigation and payments will certainly play a role in Twitter monetization.”
Twitter would couple e-commerce with advice from other shoppers, an element that most search engines do not offer. Shopping on Twitter could also potentially be useful on mobile phones, on which it is more difficult to surf the Web. People might find it simpler to ask for advice on a product, pick it out and pay for it on the same site.
Mr. Chaffee said the company also expected to offer users the ability to sort their Twitter streams. “Over time, Twitter will develop filters to help users manage and classify their tweet streams into useful categories, such as tweets from friends, family, celebrities, news organizations, charities,” Mr. Chaffee said.
So instead of Oprah, Kevin Rose and your sister getting equal play on Twitter, you might be able to see different feeds for colleagues, family members and celebrities.
Twitter might also offer feeds centered on topics. For example, if you are interested in cooking, there might be a Twitter stream that includes Martha Stewart, Ruth Reichl and other cooks and food writers you might not otherwise have known about.
Some third-party Twitter applications, including TweetDeck, Filttr and twitTangle, already enable Twitter users to filter and sort their tweets.
That is the case with many features that Twitter might want to add someday. If the company does decide to include those features in the service, Twitter could either develop its own version, acquire a company already doing it or, most likely, team up with third-party developers and work out a revenue-sharing deal, Mr. Chaffee said.
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