Twitter is at a bit of a crossroads in its development.

While it has been working on its infrastructure and building it’s staff of nearly 30, it has relied on venture capital for funding, but early in 2009, the company has announced, that it intends to eventually, “become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model.”

In the world of Web 2.0, there are basically three ways to get money - from investors, from advertisers, or from users. Ultimately, whoever is paying for the service, has control of it.

If a company is heavily reliant on investors, it is beholden to those investors, to meet the goals of the investors, whether they be monetary or otherwise. We watched Digg.com go down this path a couple of years ago, much to its detriment.

As a fan of Twitter, I’m happy to see that it is moving away from this option. But then that leaves advertisers or user-paid services.

Either way, the company is likely to receive complaints - users, who have been enjoying an increasingly great service for a couple of years now are not going to appreciate the change. But the company needs to stay in business somehow.

The problem with advertisers is that are answering to their customers, and must be choosy about the content on the websites they advertise on, and they often end up indirectly controlling the content.

The problem with paid service is that, well, users prefer “free” to “paid,” all other things being equal.

Co-Founder of Twitter, Evan Williams recently hinted that Twitter may use some sort of tiered approach, and charging corporate who are using the service for sales and customer service.

I personally hope Twitter does take the paid service approach. This will allow the company to be more independent, and user-centric, and will allow the company to continue to let the users have more control over the content. Assuming the pricing structure is reasonable for business clients, it will also allow the service to earn a profit.

Why is everyone on the right side of the blogosphere suddenly all a-Twitter?

Well my short answer to this question is that I don’t know. I don’t really think anyone can explain “why Twitter, why now?” But I do know we, as political conservatives and as the minority online, have desperately needed a place to find each other and network, and that Twitter seems to have filled that need, for now. It’s simple to learn and use, relatively safe, and very flexible in what you can do with it.

But I just don’t get it, you might be thinking. I know - You don’t have time for it. You don’t need any more friends, and you don’t want to know what people doing every minute of the day…yada yada…. Well, my friend, all of that doesn’t matter. Sometimes you just need to be where the action is, so you don’t miss out.

Yes, as with all things technology-related this, too, will pass, and we’ll all move on to something else down the road. But right now, there are around 1,000 Tweeters who have proudly identified themselves as politically-conservative. Why don’t you just go down there and see what all the fuss is about? Who knows, you might just have some fun while you’re there.

For those who are already on Twitter, and are ready to take it to the next level, here are some more great resources:

Customize your Twitter Background
 
Check out Twitbacks.com.  This is a free service with several different templates you can use to customize your Twitter background, and display more info about what you’re doing in the sidebar of you Twitter Profile. It’s simple and easy to use.  And, don’t forget, you can do a lot to your Twitter profile under the “settings” tab on Twitter - then go to “design.”
 
Find other Conservatives on Twitter
 
Here are three great places to locate conservatives on Twitter.
 
TCON - This group, started by @velvethammer, is a list of political conservatives on twitter, ranked in the order they joined the group.
Conservative GOP - Started by @SheridanFolger, is a list of Republicans on Twitter, ranked in the order they joined the group.
#TCOT - Top Conservatives On Twitter:  This group, started by @michaelpleahy, is a list of conservatives on Twitter, ranked by the number of followers each member has.  Note that this group is VERY competetive*.

Want to find Tweeters interested in other topics besides conservative politics?  Check out Twitter Groups.

Bonus:  See @GovTwit for a Directory of Govt. & Govt. Industry Twitter ID’s and other social media (or click here).
 
Cull your Twitter List
 
*Twitter can be used for a number of things.  If you’re on Twitter simply for the sake of exchanging information with like-minded individuals, you might want to stop reading right here.  This next section is for those interested in building a network.
 
On Twitter, you follow some people, and some people follow you.  To build a network, you must watch the ratio between these two groups closely.  If you’re following a lot more people than you have followers, you’ll be viewed as a “spammer.”  If you’re not following many of your followers, they may eventually drop you to get their own ratio of followers to followees in line.
 
A quick way to find out who you’re following that is not following you back is to go to Dossy, and use the “whack” feature.  This site will allow you to bulk-follow or bulk-unfollow unfollow anyone who is not really helping your Twitter “Karma.” As with most open-source software associated with Twitter, it is always a good idea to change the password on your Twitter after using any site that has required you to give your Twitter password for a temporary function. I have used this site, extensively, however, with no problems at all, and have been quite pleased with the results.

Also see: Cool Tools to Save Time in Social Networking

I found two great time-savers this week to help with the “tedious” part of social networking (to leave more time for the “fun” part!). I’m involved in so many social networks right now that I was beginning to find them incredibly time-consuming. It’s important not to automate your social networking activities entirely. Not many people want to “socialize” with a spambot - they’d like to know they’re dealing with a real live person. However, using these tools appropriately can free up some of your time online so that you can spend it actually enjoying the process of social networking, instead of constantly logging in and copying and pasting important updates from one network to another.

Ping.fm

I started paying attention to some of my friends’ Twitter and Facebook updates, and discovered several of them were using Ping.fm. I checked it out - and love Ping.fm. You should check it out, too! From Ping.fm, I can Tweet, and update several of my networks and microblogs (Linked-IN, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, etc.) all at once. Some folks even use it to update their Instant-Messaging buddies.

It takes a few minutes to set up, because you have to enter all of your user ID’s and passwords on all of your various networks, but once you’ve done that, you can easily send out a post about your latest blog entry, or announce your latest bit of news to all of your friends on all of your networks all at once. There are also all sorts of options for customizing and selecting which networks to update with what. Check it out!

[Insert the obligatory warning about not overutilizing this great tool, thus loosing all of your online friends all at once in the process. Remember, many of your friends probably follow you on more than one social network, so this service is not the place to auto-feed ALL of your posts from ALL of your blogs to ALL of your networks. Please. Seriously. We now return you to our regularly-scheduled newletter update.]

TweetLater.com

The free version of this service allows you to schedule (future-post) your Tweets on Twitter. This is very convenient for recurring events such as iRadio broadcasts, or for times when you’ll be on vacation, but still need to send reminders to your Twitter followers.

This service also allows you to set up one custom (filtered) version of your Twitterfeed to post on your blog or elsewhere (first feed is free - additional feeds available for purchase). This is great, because you can filter out the “chat” and silliness that makes Twitter fun for you but might be lost on your blog readers, and post just the “serious” stuff in the feed that displays on your blog or website.

TweetLater.com (free version) also gives you a “birdseye view” of all of your replies on all of your Twitter accounts all at once. It actually alerts you to more replies than your @replies feature on Twitter. The @replies feature on Twitter only displays tweets which begin with @yourusername. It will not display tweets which have @yourusername displayed elsewhere in the tweet but TweetLater.com’s feed does pick these up.

For example, this would show up in the @replies section on Twitter:

@yourusername - Thanks for the follow!

But this would not show up in your @replies section on Twitter (you would need to use a service like TweetLater.com, or Search.Twitter.com to find it):

@hisusername, @herusername, @yourusername - Check out my new avatar!

The paid version of this service (PostLater.com-$10/mo) allows you to future-post to any service, including Ping.fm, which does not already have a future-posting feature.