Twitter to charge businesses to tweet

Twitter has confirmed it will be introducing paid-for business accounts.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations and publicity. That's something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There's not much detail available but paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren't available through Twitter's existing application program interface API and possibly a whole separate "commercial API" for business-related applications. This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for prominent users.

In fact, Stone said, the first test phase of these accounts is already under way with a few companies. Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55m in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

VentureBeat's Matt Marshall points out: "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." Stone made it pretty clear in the interview that ordinary Twitter users won't be forced to pay up.

Stone also in the interview that Twitter had been looking to acquire social-network aggregator FriendFeed, which was picked up by Facebook earlier this month.

Original article: Twitter pro accounts coming by year's end from CNET News.com