The Year Of Tweeting Dangerously

It’s been a tough few months for Twitter and its users, as the social network service has been downed by several outages in recent weeks, dismissed as irrelevant by David Letterman and been used as the basis for a lawsuit by a landlord.

But the biggest danger facing Twitter, other than the scale of its success, may well be that the oxygen of potential revenue has been sucked out of the room by other service providers. Even not-for-profits have found ways to use Twitter to generate revenue — cash that won’t be coming to Twitter. The biggest business draw for Twitter is the ability to track what customes think about their brands and react to them quickly, but customers are paying the likes of Salesforce.com, not Twitter itself. Numerous businesses have also sprung up to help Twitter users interface with the service, either by helping users organize their Twitter existence or by shortening URLs so they can add links to their Tweets without overstepping the 140-character limit.

Twitter says it has a plan to make money, and has tried to lay the groundwork by creating Twitter 101, a sort of FAQ for potential enterprise customers. And co-founder Biz Stone told GigaOm

Twitter will continue to focus on this group by possibly offering paid analytics or verified accounts services to businesses. “We think that because they are getting value out of Twitter, we want to follow that value,” he said. So, keep an eye out for enterprise-focused services coming shortly.

That’s all well and good, but the question (for Twitter as well as the likes of Seesmic, Tweetdeck and other services built on Twitter) is whether or not it will be too late to the party.