There’s often information that many people want in a timely manner. Think footy scores, and play by play descriptions. Think best fuel prices in your location. Think stock alerts. Even entertainment services like horoscopes. Things that people are happy to spend a small amount of money to receive.
Twitter provides a nice way for users to receive this information, where they are already receiving a lot of other information that is important to them.
So take this example: Bob is a cricket fan who would like to receive a play by play for a test match.
Bob subscribes (note I said subscribe, not follow) to a twitter bot who’s sole purpose is to tweet the play by play for that match.
Bob receives the play by play tweets in his twitter stream.
How it happens:
- The cricket twitter bot that Bob wants to subscribe to protects it’s twitter updates.
- To follow the bot, Bob visits a website where he enter’s his twitter details (using oAuth) to follow the bot.
- The website requests payment and then approves Bob to follow the bot for a period of time.
- Once that subscription period is over, the bot removes Bob from it’s list of approved users. If Bob wants to keep following the cricket bot, he subscribes again.
I’m sure there are other information based services people would be happy to pay for, just I can’t think of them.
So my question is, if someone was providing useful information on twitter, would you pay to follow them to receive that info?
