I like the notion of get satisfaction style pay-to-play “subscriptions” to your search terms if you’re a company or service provider. The problem (as I see it) is that you can unofficially get all of this information anyway…it’s only when/if you want an official voice on the channel that there’s any actual identification to brand. That said, I think most companies would pony up to have the official megaphone. But you need to bundle some awesome to go with that, or else, as you say, the model falls apart.

http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/twitter-dell-million/

I have some problems with that model. For one thing, while it keeps things free it doesn’t stop any of the spam. Also, I’m not sure that the Dell example means much. A million dollars over a year and a half is a very small amount of money to a company like Dell. And then Twitter would have the problems that the advertising industry has to deal with: How much do you charge Dell? How much will Dell be willing to pay? And isn’t there some risk that these kind of deals will become kind of shady over time? Like mysteriously I’ll have trouble getting my tweets but somehow those offers from @Dell will keep rolling right in. And then how soon until you *have* to be subscribed to commercial Twitter streams?

And isn’t Dell providing some value to the Twitter users with its offers? Doesn’t that make it counter productive to charge Dell? And how do you police something like that anyway? If some employee of yours starts talking about your product and service on Twitter, are they advertising? Do you start taxing word-of-mouth?

Maybe there’s a middle way here, but I’m not seeing it.