As the Twitter Tweets – the please shoot me now episode

While I might think that all this interest in all things Twitter is borderline stupid I have a job to do and that means putting aside my feelings about Twitter and tell you the news.

Yes folks.. get ready … Twitter has a business model. Their not going to tell us about it but according to what Lidija Davis over at ReadWriteWeb has been able to determine from what one of the members of Sparks Capital – a VC company who recently joined with Union Square Ventures to funnel another $35 million Twitter’s way – said at a recent conference

“We think it’s kind of funny,” [Todd] Dagres recently told Innovation Economy. “We know how we’re going to do it, and we’re very confident about how we’re going to do it, and it’s not necessarily in our interest to tell people how we’re going to do it.”

This apparently has something to do with some coming changes yet to be implemented that won’t undermine the experience or vitality and when it happens we’ll all go oh my god why didn’t we think of that in a unified blogging explosion of press for the company. Well if their recent move in Canada to cut a deal with Bell Mobility their business model looks to include a lot of screwing the users while making the providers look like the bad guys.

While the Register is reporting that Bell has changed its mind from the original plan to charge 15 cents per tweet (via SMS) both in and out to one of having it included in existing text plans. The charge would only take effect if the customer exceeds their plans limits. The thing is that this is still an exclusive deal between Bell Mobility and Twitter aka the iPhone distribution plan. Which means that anyone using any of the other cell phone companies is shit out of luck.

As much as we might want to speculate whether or not Twitter has a business plan it is obvious that at some level they must have. After all you don’t generally get some very smart money people willing to jump on the bandwagon or to double down on their bet in the case of Union Square Ventures. I have a feeling that what plan they do have will be a multi-prong one that won’t affect the basic service or developer access to that basic service. However when it comes to things like cutting deals with providers anything goes – including whether or not their users will end up getting screwed as they almost did in Canada.

[twitter bird courtesy of The Leader]