“Like to know how much of your own $$ you’d expunge on server space to manage those conversations.” – My own $$? Your $30 will cover it just fine, thankyou. (100 people each tweeting 140 characters 100 times a day for a year = half a gigabyte of data. Excuse me a moment, I think I have a USB key somewhere down the back of my sofa…)

“Maybe you & I have different needs/value we obtain from Twitter.” – It sounds like it, yes. Twitter may be 40% babble, but if one thousandth of one percent of that babble is *my* grandma’s meatball recipe, then that’s a significant part of Twitter’s value proposition for me. Babble is valuable in context. Is Twitter (in its current form) worth $30 a year to me? Probably. Would it still be worth $30 to me once the “long tail” of occasional contributors were excluded? I suspect not. Maybe you’re in the unusual position where your entire value on Twitter is gained from that 1-2% power user category – but how can you be sure that *they* would want to stay on once their social circle had been slashed? There’s only way to know, and it seems to me that my proposition is the best way of testing that, seeing as it doesn’t involve tearing down something hugely successful.

I would pay for Twitter for a lot of reasons — the networking, great stories, personalized news feed, community, people. And I think everyone having to pay would indeed improve the perception of the platform.

There are still so many people who see Twitter as a place to talk about the meatballs you mentioned or as the Verizon commercial says, to tell people “I’m sitting on the patio.” (Think that ad was almost like Verizon saying we don’t get Twitter, but that’s another story).

If we had to pay for Twitter, yes a lot of the spammers would go away. But I think it would also legitimize the platform — doubters might say, “Wow, people are paying for this. I need to take a second look.” — and might lead to much more constructive conversation and relationships.

Plus, the pay for play motto would save users a lot of time potentially wasted trying to research if they’re actually talking to the official brand handle.

Do you think one of the reasons we haven’t seen this pay model yet is because such a transition would cause Twitter’s usage numbers to go way down…numbers they no doubt have used to promote and secure VC and numbers that have no doubt influenced people’s perception of the platform?

What’s more important to Twitter? Our $25/$30 a year or the perception that many millions of people are using Twitter, a number that’s increasing exponentially? Thoughts?

If you’re interested in reading it: http://schmorgasboard.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/where-twitter-should-go/

Diane