It's only a matter of time before Twitter is bought by bastards. The Guardian report today that there's talk of Rupert Murdoch getting his snout in there, and you can bet your life that all the big media companies have at least pondered an acquisition, and wondered how they would profit.

Profit. That's the thing. No-one yet has found a way to make profit out of Twitter. And to be honest, we should be very grateful. Because you can so easily imagine Murdoch would start charging developers who want to develop Twitter apps, he'd report all protesters to the Iranian police (even if they lived in Cuba), and he'd start up Twitter accounts for characters in 20th Century Fox movies that would follow you and were unblockable. And you would DEFINITELY get adverts in your time line. Whereas Twitter's users would choose to keep it free, retain the open API policies, and to keep the spirit of the site alive.

Now, it could be that Twitter aren't considering selling at all. Perhaps it's safe for a while. But let's talk about a time when they run into some financial difficulties. There are three solutions. First, sell to a big company who can fund it, but who may also ruin it. Second, hope that some benevolent millionaire will come along and just give them a load of money for free to keep it running. Third, start a subscription service. I'd vote for the third, but they've made no attempt to do it so far, so why would they start now? Well, how about this for an option:

In the event that Twitter goes up for sale, we propose that we, the users, buy Twitter, and run it not-for-profit. We ask for a voluntary subscription, which gives you ace new features which don't currently exist, and also allows you to genuinely participate in the decision-making of the site's management and future. Any profit goes straight back into the site. We keep it advert free, we keep it open, and we encourage developers to carry on making their apps. Twitter will be run by the users, for the users, and not to line the pockets of soulless media multinationals.

Let's talk details:

1) We draw up a manifesto in which we declare very clearly that we want to keep the spirit of Twitter alive, that we will always keep it ad-free, and that for as long as we are running it, subscription will never be mandatory, ever. We let The Internets read it and propose changes. When we have a perfect document, we ask people to donate money towards buying Twitter (e.g. £20 GBP / $32 USD / €23 EUR). If we can raise enough, we buy Twitter. If we don't, we could either return the money to the donors, or give it all to one of a few relevant charities (here's a few to be thinking about).

2) A small collective run the not-for-profit company. We don't make the big decisions - those are decided by the subscribers, and more on that later - but we put the decisions into practice, maintain the infrastructure, and try to promote the site in a positive way. At least some of those people will be full-time employees; others might work part-time or freelance. In practice, Twitter will be owned by a company which belongs to a small group of people, but high levels of transparency and democracy, and community-based decision-making will reassure users that we all own Twitter.

3) In the first year, everyone who donated gets upgraded to a new 'members' account for a year, which could give added customisability and extra features. People who didn't donate can still buy one of these. After that, people re-subscribe on a yearly basis. These features must NOT be the sort of features that already exist. Instead, they should be super-awesome extras which will make Twitter nicer to use. I'm thinking along the lines of:

- The option to choose from a selection of your own user icons with each post, instead of just the one.
- The option to have HTML on your user profile instead of just a picture. Would be good for bands and performers, links to CDs for sale etc.
- A larger selection of pre-made profile designs.
- A larger character limit in the user profile. Seriously, why limit that to 140 characters as well?
- Custom following lists, so you don't miss tweets from your nearest and dearest (many apps do this already, but it'd be nice to have it on the site).
- The ability to post 'locked' tweets, either only to people who follow you, or only to people you're following, or even to a small selection of those people, like LiveJournal does with the custom friends groups. Would be useful for organising events.
- The ability to report spammers without having to follow the @spam account (though really I'd be happy to make this feature free to everyone).
- The option to include location information within a tweet, ie. not part of the 140 character limit.

I think features like this will inspire people to pay, and thus to keep the service alive. And I do think that Twitter users are the sort of people who will pay. I've read of marketing studies which are admittedly mostly anecdotal, but they suggest that users of Twitter tend to be 18 or over. So the users of Twitter have a bit of cash to spend, as opposed to most of the users of Bebo, for example.

But as well as getting people to pay in exchange for great extras, I also want to make the subscribers a part of the decision-making process itself.

Every six months, we could have a general meeting in London which is fully streamed over the net, and allows people to participate in deciding how things are going. Is the service reliable? Too slow? Can we improve it with the money we have? Any suggestions for new features? Shall we make it 100% open source? Anyone got any new code they want to donate? These are the sort of things we'll put open to the vote. We can tell everyone at all times how much money is in the bank so that our subscribers have the information to make informed decisions. We put the big things like that out to the vote, and we action it as best we can.

What we don't do is let it bankrupt us ethically. We make it clear that if we ever go significantly into the red, we will sell it to anyone who isn't called Rupert Murdoch, and who will promise to look after the site, not introduce adverts etc. Even we do sell, the sale has to be approved by the members. We tell them "we either sell or we shut down. Tell us what you want, and that's what we'll do."

This is all quite vague in my mind at the moment, but what do you think? Any flaws? Impossible in practice? Would you stump up a donation? Would you buy a paid account? If so, how much would you be willing to pay for a year's subscription? If you're interested, please flesh out ideas/correct me/suggest alternatives in the comments. Remember, if you don't have a LiveJournal blog, you can still comment anonymously, or using OpenID if you have a Wordpress/Blogger account.


(Huge thanks to @schiaparelli for her insightful suggestions and improvements to this idea. You can follow me here: @chris_coltrane.)