No doubt, though, that Twitter costs a crapload of money — who’s funding this? What do they expect to get out of it? It just seems so unrealistic to expect that giving away a service will equate to revenue — no wonder there’s talk of a bubble.

Do you know anyone who uses Pownce? I don’t.

If Twitter doesn’t go freemium, the other option is probably advertising, or just getting bought by a much larger company with more resources to allow them to continue being free (Google / YouTube) while they figure out an advertising strategy.

As you say though, maybe the free model of the internet does start to spoil things. I have free broadband at home that comes with a telephone plan that I buy. The internet connection is fine, however, if like some people I have problems with it, my provider has less to worry about since I’ll be getting what I paid for (ie nothing). Yes, on the internet we want everything, we want it to run perfectly and we don’t want to pay for it, but sometimes there has to be a compromise and in Twitter’s case at the moment it is that it doesn’t run perfectly. I can live with that. I’m not sure I’d be so happy if there was a stage when you start to pay for Twitter in order to improve it, but you don’t get that immediate benefit. Then you are compromising on two factors.

I hope Twitter can sort something out for a decent revenue stream soon and I think you are probably right in guessing that freemium will be the model, but in the meantime I wish people would stop complaining about the minute percentage of downtime Twitter has achieved when it is a free service.