Have we become such egoists that if we can’t tell everyone we know that we’re having a cup of coffee at Starbucks RIGHT NOW it constitutes an emergency worth ranting on a blog about? (awkward sentence but I think you get my point).

And I don’t think any service should offer free outgoing SMS, like some have. This is something that really has costs involved and if someone wants that, they should pay. It still amazes that Google offers free outgoing calendar reminder SMS’s – they have spent a fortune on me without getting anything back :)

Above the twitter argument, this applies to all the new free web services

If you derive value from the service, you should expect to pay. Maybe you get lucky and some other revenue model is in place, so you don’t have to, but to claim that you should not pay is ridiculous.

We have the folk making their living off the coat tails of Web2.0 crapping on about services that do not have a revenue model. Then, they complain when they can’t get stuff for free.

Come on guys, some logic please even in 2.0 days.

(although charging won’t fix the issues at T…. it isn’t cash they need)

1. Should people like Scoble pay for their extensive use of Twitter.

I think no. Power-users like Scoble did and do a lot to promote the service, his use still brings in users.

2. Should businesses pay for their use of Twitter?

That depends on what Twitter wants to be. If they want to be a basic messaging utility, charging businesses could stop adoption of Twitter with businesses, which would strengthen their position as the one and only messaging system.
If Twitter “only” wants to be a group chat, they can charge businesses, but businesses would lose interest in the service anyway.

But: Money isn’t Twitter’s main problem. Scaling is.

Kevin, I disagree with paid vs. free. Once someone passes a threshold, it is likely in their best interest from either a personal point of view (communication device) or business point (marketing device).

Nothing comes for free. Either Twitter will implement a model or a buyer will. Either way, it is not going to be free forever.

Well, Google basically *is* the advertising model, and YouTube obviously fits under the umbrella. There aren’t a lot of other successful companies I know of that are purely advertising driven (and when I say successful, I’m talking about having a sustainable business model). I always use Flickr as a successful counter model — that is people are more than happy to pay to use the pro service because it adds real value.

As to the pay vs. free model – I think paid services will be swimming upstream. Paid services will have slower growth and therefore a much lower potential for big VC payouts.