As I’ve mentioned countless times before, I love Twitter, with addiction passion. It’s social networking without the awkwardness of instant messenger. What do I mean by awkwardness? Well, I’ve never been a big fan of instant messaging. I find that IM is great for discussing technical issues and problems with people as you can talk someone through something quicker and easier than doing it via e-mail. But, for general chat I tend to avoid IM as I’m (really) shy and find the silences after “Hi, how you doing?” and “Oh, I’m great thanks!” quite uncomfortable. Twitter for me is the happy medium – a cross between e-mail and IM, if you like. I can have direct contact with fellow twitterers by putting the @ before their name, or of course direct messaging if I wanted to speak to someone quickly but out of the public twitter timeline.

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But, back to my point. Pay As You Tweet. Recently Twitter, like today for example, has been having some issues with regards to uptime and when you consider the amount of people using it thesedays then it’s little wonder that niggles are appearing. For a while I’ve been expecting them to announce a Pro account, much like Flickr, where you pay $25 per year for no limitations, but keeping the free account with restrictions. Because there are a lot of people using Twitter for spamming purposes who add thousands of friends to their list, it would be good to put a limit on the free users accounts, say 200-300 friends. To add more than that they’d have to go Twitter Pro.

I would quite happily pay $25 for Twitter, like I do with Flickr Pro, if it meant a more reliable service as it’s something I do tend to use every single day and I see it as a mini-blog. It’s definitely become more than simply “What are you doing?” that’s for sure. I’m sure a lot of people feel the same. One such person is Brent who started this conversation. I was going to reply to that, but the registration process for Utterz requires a cell phone number and I *hate* sites that force you into giving info you don’t want to give.

So yeah, it may or may not come, but I’m all for giving something back to sites that make me happy. Twitter, you are one of them. Take my money. It’s yours. I will never leave you for Pownce.

Related links that may or may not be useful.