Well, they could start charging to use the service - or is that too straight forward? Why not a Twitter professional? They could turn the Yammer idea into something useful given their huge base of users.

PS - sorry, couldn't think of a word that starts with and 'A' :)

Hopefully Google doesn't buy them or that will be the end of Twitter.

Mark, have you looked at Tweetie's revenue model? While I have no idea how much revenue they generate it seems that they're right on the mark. Either you buy their app ad free or you use the free version with advertising inserted in the tweet stream. The thing is the ads are nice, unobtrusive, very targeted and useful - I find myself clicking through quite often. Besides that, in my view Tweetie is one of the best Twitter clients there are.

PS - I gave up on Tweetdeck because it slows down my MacBook too much. My second choice is Twirl which I use on my Windows machine; but I still prefer Tweetie because it has a great UI for monitoring multiple Twitter streams.

I don't think we're ready for another shiny, social media bauble. The vast majority of businesses have yet to figure out how to leverage the ones we have. My bets are on tools that leverage the existing social media ecosystems to make money that can be easily understood and deployed by small businesses.

If you're going to automate tweets or follows then it's best to let people know. For example, I follow @thisissethsblog because I know I'll receive a tweet when there's a new blog post. But when people start mixing in personal tweets and automated tweets (especially lots of them) it drives me nuts and usually results in an unfollow.

I use Twitter much as you describe: as an access to "content curators" (a great term). Twitter is great at getting interesting tidbits of information that you would never have seen via a news reader. Learning about the interesting things that other people are doing is a great motivator.

I tweet or re-tweet any items that I think will be of interest to my followers. I follow anyone that has similar interests to myself and I'll unfollow anyone that consistently tweets about things that are trivial or depressing.

Sometimes there's too much information to read and lately I've been using Favorites to tag them for review later. I shut down Twitter whenever I need to focus on my work otherwise it's too distracting.

Twitter is becoming a great way to get in contact with like-minded people in my locality. I've met some new and interesting people through Twitter many of which have become good friends.

I've also been using Twitter to plan and manage meet-ups. It's a great way to let your followers know about events and it tends to attract interest from others as well.

Other examples: Basecamp, Github. I usually try the free version of the service and it's pretty easy to tell if there's value in upgrading to the premium version. Though it's too bad all these apps aren't more compatible with each other.

Mark, you are still are a journalist. You've just found a different way to "gather and disseminate information about current events, trends, issues, and people while striving for viewpoints that aren't biased" (Wikipedia).

Shouldn't the question be "how does a journalist continue to be fairly compensated for the work that they do?

It's the same question that musicians are asking themselves as legacy content
distribution methods (i.e. CDs) vanish.

It's the same question telecom engineers ask themselves as legacy telecommunication networks become less relevant.

It should be the same question that scientists, or accountants, or bankers, or software programmers, or marketers, or lawyers, and so on, should be asking themselves.

I think the right question is "what steps are you taking today to be ready for the inevitable?"