Is it Time to Start Paying for Twitter?

Twitter is over capacity again as I write. This is no big problem in itself. I can live without the constant stream of witty and insightful interruptions to my day. Hey, I might actually get some work done. But the problem is indicative of Twitter's failure to scale its infrastructure to meet demand. The service is free, so who am I to complain? They might do better if we were paying for the service.

The thing I'm concerned about is not Twitter itself, but our increasing reliance on services like it. Imagine the uproar if time-sink FaceBook was offline for a few hours. Logged on Romeos would have to stop chatting up their childhood sweethearts and do something productive instead. We're all using more and more online services. These need to scale to our demands and we'll probably have to pay for them to make it happen. Do we all need to pay however?

Spotify is a good example where payment is optional. If you want a better service, you pay more. There are four models to choose from: Open (20 hours max per week), Free (invite only, supported by adverts), Unlimited (£4.99 a month), Premium (£9.99 a month with offline capability). That's awesome - if you want more, you pay more: simple.

I can see a day when we all pay (tiny amounts, I hope!) for each of the services we take for granted now. Twitter, FaceBook et al could all adopt a similar model to Spotify. In the meantime, we'll occasionally suffer the Fail Whale...