What now for Twitter?

Where now, where does it go with its income generation plans?

More importantly, what do you do with the few thousand that now follow you?

The internet was rife with takeover talk all last week, with Google being lined up as a likely new owner.

Prior to this Twitter had been revealing its first few cards on the monetisation issue. Since time immemorial, people have been asking how Twitter was actually going to make some money from its hugely popular application.

Over the last few weeks some answers have been appearing to this long asked question.

The top right hand corner of a user homepage started to evolve to incorporate subtle advertising for Twitter applications and the alike.

This Twitter advertising was noticed by several blogs almost immediately.

I'd mooted the idea of Twitter charging to un-throttle the API that it recently placed on the interface. It seems almost inevitably one avenue that they will explore, as much seemed obvious when they first placed the throttle on the API a few months back.

Meanwhile, the debate continues as to who would support Twitters ads in a move to a more commercially driven platform, how Twitter would move to a more commercial platform, to finally, all out hatred of the idea of Twitter commercialisation.

Whatever the outcome for Twitters business model, I don't think it would be too presumptive to assume that more monetisation schemes will see the light of day on the Twitter interface in the near future.

In the meantime, the other recent development for Twitter and for all of its many faithful users (that's me and you), is what do to do with the recently expanded number of followers.

My recommendation to anyone using Twitter would be more of the same, business as usual. Twitter hasn't changed the way it works nor would I change the way I use the interface.

The only difference is instead of getting your message dashing in front of the eyes of few hundred followers, you might now have several hundred, or for some lucky folk, several thousand.

But nothing else has changed, keep your messages clear and informative, keep the conversation going. Continue sharing the links you feel are valuable, stay cool and remember not to deviate too far from your original purpose for using Twitter, whether that be promoting your business, brand or your own personal agenda.

In the meantime, hopefully, Twitter will continue to invest more money into its infrastructure and development. This should iron out the usability issues you can sometimes encounter and hopefully the capacity issues that are illustrated by the now infamous appearance of the Twitter Fail Whale.

Twitter might be evolving its commercial approach, even our use of the platform might be maturing, but the same principles are here and I see the application being around for sometime.

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