#Twitter Monetization fail?

I have been meaning to post about my thoughts on twitters announcements on trying to monetize itself. I have also meant to get some fucking sleep (yay 2 A.M. wireframes!).

The first announcement is that Twitter will licensee it's name and run ads for twitter aggregators and apps such as execu tweets and tweet deck. This just seems like the law of diminishing returns. If the only thing a brand has to sell is itself then I just feel like it has announced that it has accepted defeat. Pretty much an epic meh nice try guys.

Also, ad placements on a destination site, that almost no one goes to? Most people prefer to hit it up on their tweetdecks and twitterberries anyways. Their dedication to open API basically just shot them in their own foot. At some point if they want to do display ads, twitter is going to have to face the music and roll them into our streams without our consent, it's just the way it's got to be. I don't even think this would be such a bad thing, if they were very limited, like 1 an hour.

The second announcement is that they are going to create "pro" accounts. These accounts will receive better analytics tools. A couple problems here is that Twitter is so open and so limited that I don't see how they can corner the market on this. Just look at all the pre exisitng twitter apps out there. The fact is there dedication to an open extensible API has shot them in the foot again! Why would I pay for what I can get for free? and how can they continue to give us all the openy goodness services they always have without blocking these apps?

The final issue is that I am still not convinced that Twitter is a good sampling system. Let's see who uses twitter, tech forward people with a strong interest in social marketing and microblogging. Who is on Facebook MY FUCKING MOM JESUS CHRIST WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN? I HAVE TO HELP HER ATTACH FILES TO E-MAILS! Again, I hate to sound like a Twitter hater while I ask for seconds on that blueberry Facebook Kool-Aid but seriously it just has so much rich rich rich data.

Twitter Account

Name (sometimes faked Social Marketer, The Angry is not my christian name)
SHORT bio
Website

Facebook

Name (usually real)
Gender
Location
Age
Networks
Religion (admittedly usually something they think is clever)
Politics (also, pretty useless piece)
Single/Married
maybe even Phone Number and Address

Clearly segmenting is a tad easier on Facebook, and more useful. Another thing Facebook has never done is ALLOWED ANYONE AND EVERYONE to scrape that data. The sole gatekeeper is Facebook. I know they wield those keys responsibly but OH HOLY SHIT FACEBOOK KNOWS WAY TO MUCH ABOUT ME!

Seriously, they know every birthday party I have attended, they know which friends I wall post with, how often I post fuzzy animals acting like humans, they know all my past employers, they know where I live, they know what movies I watch on Netflix, they know EVERYFUCKINGTHING ABOUT ME!

Anyways, yeah so that's my take on the prospects of Twitter working to monetize itself. Analytics would be great if had a wider sample set, and if there was reason not to use a free service.