Posts Tagged ‘Stephen Fry’

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is today reported to have announced the service may start charging for commercial use. Sharp-eyed Biz notes:

There’s no indication of the cost yet.

How will Twitter decide what constitutes ‘commercial use’? Will Stephen Fry get charged, for example? Surely that would be an example of a celebrity using Twitter to advance his personal brand, although I’m certain Mr Fry would reject that idea. In practice, won’t this turn into another case of a social media service making fairly arbitrary decisions about who to charge based on their perception about a company’s ability to pay. Start-ups and ‘cool’ Web 2.0-style services will get away with it but the big boys will get hammered. This is hypocritical: you can’t spend half your time having a go at old-school businesses for being backwards in failing to adopting the ‘culture of generosity’ whilst simultaneously punishing them for not being cool with an inequitable pricing policy that prohibits them from using these services.

We tried to use a prominent photo-sharing service on one of our sites last year. The costs we were were quoted were ridiculous, and the sell was utterly unconvincing in terms of the supposed benefits for our client. I found the whole episode quite depressing.

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