Twitter to roll out commercial accounts this year

Yes, Twitter will start earning some income this year.

Co-founder Biz Stone tells VentureBeat the company is in the first phase of rolling out commercial accounts that will entice business users to pay for premium services like detailed analytics. After that, the company might move into building business-oriented application programming interfaces (APIs), creating a “commercial layer” over the social network. The commercial APIs would be out “later this year,” he said.

“Twitter will still be free for everybody and we’ll still tell them to go crazy with it,” said Stone in an interview. “But we’ve identified a selection of things that businesses say are helping to make them more profit.”

The company has already moved in this direction by releasing a guide for professional users, detailing how companies can use it to find customers, pass on deals and perform market research. It is also going to offer “certified accounts,” for businesses, for example letting JetBlue certify that its Twitter account is owned by JetBlue and not by someone pretending to be JetBlue (until now, Twitter has done this only for a limited number of people, including celebrities). Stone didn’t give a specific date for when the company would launch the newer commercial offerings.

Also, it might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for.

“We want to build statistics or analytics that let users know — ‘How am I doing on Twitter?’” he said.

Click here for the VentureBeat story.