Twitter is in the process of developing tools and services
businesses can use togenerate revenue for the freemicro-blogging
site. It is also trying to retain users once they have tried out
the service.
Twitter co-founder, Biz Stone, told Reuters users can expect
these tools by the end of the year.
Twitter has rejected the possibility of selling advertising
space to generate income.
"There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising. One
is it's just not quite as interesting to us," he told the Reuters
Global Technology Summit in New York.
He said adverts alongside Twitter messages could annoy users and
the company is not looking to recruit advertising executives.
"There are no people at Twitter who know anything about
advertising or work in advertising. So we don't have anyone there
to make or take those calls," said Stone.
The company has 40 employees and said it will double this before
the end of the year.
Stone said Twitter would remain free for consumers and
businesses. He added that the website would develop features for
commercial users, such as lightweight analyticsand a directory of
commercial accounts that would verify that businesses on Twitter
are legitimate.
He added that Twitter is talking to mobile phone operators to
make sure Twitter works on their networks and revenue sharing with
carriers could be introduced.
Twitter has grown by more than 3,000% in the past year,
according to figures from internet monitoring site Hitwise. Its
share of UK traffic increased by about 33 times between February
2008 and February 2009. The site is growing 25 times faster than
Facebook, which grew 123% in the same period.
But Twitter will struggle to grow as a business if it fails to
convert the large volume of people that try it out into loyal,
long-term customers.
More than 60% of people that sign up to Twitter stop using it by
the next month, according to research carried out by Nielson
Online in the US.
In his blog, David Martin, vice-president of primary research at
Nielsen Online, said social networking sites that have made it big
recorded better retention rates in their early days. "Even when
Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now,
their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through
their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and
both sit at nearly 70% today."
Twitter co-founder
Jack Dorsey told the Los Angeles Times that the company is
looking at ways of getting new users hooked.