Twitter is undoubtedly the hottest Web property with no revenue model. Silicon Alley Insider's Nate Westheimer suggests that the microblogging service move into the peer-to-peer mobile payments space,
where "no one has much of a head start."
So what are P2P mobile payments? Think PayPal for your phone. What does this have to do with Twitter? At first glance, not much, really, except for
the fact that Twitter is widely used on mobile phones. As Westheimer says, "Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile
service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address."
Forget for a moment that the Twitter infrastructure often fails, and consider the implications of a carrier-independent mobile messaging system. This is effectively what Twitter could achieve when the
re-architecting "is all said and done," making it a powerful alternative to social and mobile SMS text messages. As more and more people become familiar with the Twitter language, the microblogging
service could easily become the de facto platform for mobile payments. Imagine simply sending a message like "p innonate $5" to pay for a beer at a bar?
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