How can Twitter make money? Well, no one knows yet but the company appears ready to give the idea a whirl. To that end, it’s hired a business development exec, Kevin Thau.
Thau will work on the microblogging service’s partnerships across the board, with the longer term goal of focusing on growing the mobile side of the house. So far, Twitter has had little success with advertising models, so striking deals with mobile operators on, say, SMS updating of Twitter feeds — called Tweets — could be another way to generate revenue. It would behoove it to grab a piece of the mobile messaging market, which was worth $130 billion in 2008.
Twitter is a free service whose users post short messages of up to 140 characters, which can then be picked up by friends via Facebook, mobile phone, Web site, e-mail and other media.
