So why couldn’t Twitter release a premium level of its service that grants paid users a greater level of access to the platform, additional features, more API connections, etc?  This seems the logical next step.  The main service would remain free as it always had (even I didn’t need to upgrade until now), but a handful of the Twitter power users would benefit from near-real-time Twitter updates with applications such as TweetDeck and mobile devices for the iPhone or BlackBerry such as Tweetie, Twitterific and TwitterBerry.

Here is some simple math that I’ve worked out.  The numbers seem fairly reasonable so far and I welcome comments on this model.  TwitDir reports 3,328,420 twitterers that they know as of today.  I’ll use this as the base number for my calculation.  If we estimate that there are 3.3 million Twitterers out there sharing ideas, and only 5% of them are power users that require a more powerful level of Twitter power (166,421), paying only $2.99/mo…

That’s almost a half a million dollars of revenue for Twitter and all they had to do was scale up a few servers and spend a few hours coding the management/login area for users.  Hardly anything else needs to change.  The infrastructure has already been layed out and is operational.  If they wanted to, they could charge $4.99/mo for a different tier of service and offer other incentives to those users that required even more.

I’ve found myself leaving TweetDeck open on both my Mac (home) and Windows PC (work) and constantly use Tweetie on my iPhone.  There go all my API connections for the hour…they’re used up in about 30 minutes even with moderate usage.

The bottom line, would we pay for this service?  Is it so necessary to the way that we network now that users would jump into paying for it, or do we only use it now because it’s free?  My vote is for the same level of service to remain free, but offer additional options to their already-ginormous user base.

Comments welcome.