Interesting thoughts about analytics. Radian6 is a broad product – I wonder if such a purchase would cause Twitter to lose focus – they’ve done a pretty good job patiently keeping their eyes on the road.

If Twitter is able to set an expectation with a client on whether or not an ad arises, it will probably educate the user to ignore it and impact might plummet. I’d rather see Twitter build a very robust monitoring and response engine… perhaps buying Radian6… so that companies can be alerted and can respond when their companies, products, services or people are mentioned.

Stuart – what does in-stream advertising look like on DIGG? Is it in the comments or in the stream of the posts that people vote on? Would you say the user experience on DIGG is an analog to that on Twitter? That’s where I’d focus and I see the experience on the two networks (and the people who use them), vastly different.

James – I agree that Twitter ultimately needs a revenue model. Clearly, they’ve decided for the moment to focus on growth and not revenue (history will tell whether they made the right choice. Google did the same thing at one point).

Twitter needs a business model. This sort of gets them 1/4 of the way there.

On the other hand, you made the point of Google keeping AdWords clearly separated from organic search results, what if Twitter were to introduce a form of advertising system akin to the implementation of ads within Tweetie on the Mac and Twitterrific on iPhone where every 50 or so tweets is broken by a targeted ad placement? What if Twitter were to implement a similar strategy to earn revenue for themselves, perhaps ignoring (for now) the need for users to monetize their stream?

I’m in the mind that this may not be the best strategy right now – despite Twitter’s rapid expansion into the mainstream, is everyone going to put up with ads in their stream regardless of where they consume it?

The obvious opportunity that would evolve from this would be for Twitter to charge for “Pro” accounts of some form which would allow for users to opt out of receiving ads.

Perhaps these aren’t the best ideas for Twitter’s future right now though – I can see the backlash they would cause already, but they’re gonna need to bring some revenue in some day.