The Twitterfund
If we all club together, we can make twitter better

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Raising money for Twitter.

Going where VCs have yet to succeed.

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• Your £2/$5 can make Twitter better

  Do you use Twitter? Do you want to improve it?

  Do the words, "Something is technically wrong" get you down?

  If everyone who uses Twitter donates £2 or $5 each (or more), it can get better for everyone. Go on. Tweet yourself right.

• twitter.com/funding

• Twitter's current status

  • Search is slightly behind
  • Investigating Our Incomplete Search Index
  • Deletion and Restoration turned off
  • We’ve been investigating an increase in over-capacity messages (whale pages) these past few...
  • Direct message links not working

how would you fund twitter?

How would you fund Twitter?

If you were in charge of Twitter, what business model would you go for? Charge third parties to access the API? Introduce ads (like the lucky Japanese have)? Charge people to use it? Encourage people to donate whatever they want to it? View results Version 2.03

Is Plurk a Twitter killer, or is it Apple’s WWDC and the Stevenote?

Are dark clouds hovering over Twitter towers? Will Twitter’s 2nd birthday (two years old already?!) in a few weeks time mark the beginning of the end? Let’s hope not.

Yes - there’s been a recent influx of VC cash, but it comes hot on the heels of some of Twitter’s worst downtime in a while.

Coupled with that, Plurk seems to be picking up a lot of support (especially now you can import all your Twitter pals), Friendfeed’s addition of rooms has made it much more user-friendly, and tomorrow’s Stevenote at Apple’s WWDC will test Twitter’s hardware like nothing ever before.

I want it to work. I want Twitter to be faultless tomorrow. But if it doesn’t, and let’s face it - it might not - I’d like Twitter to very quickly sort out it’s business model (voluntary donations perhaps? At least to avoid ads?) to keep it’s avid users tweeting away for years (and not just days) to come.

Twitter’s uptime improving

Spotted a couple of tweets recently saying that things are looking better.

Does that mean we’ll be seeing less of screens like this? I hope so.

Raising money for Twitter - day one

It’s day one in the Twitterfund household, and already the guests are starting to enjoy themselves…

Scores on the doors so far - £20 (though more has come in even as I write this). i will try and thank people personally by email or twitter itself but if I don’t get round to it (or if twitter is broken) I apologise.

I’m now gratuitously looking for a bit of link-love. It doesn’t matter whether you’re A-list, B-list, or even ginger-list, even if you haven’t donated, please do spread the twitterfund word. Let’s raise some money for Twitter.

I thank you.

And we’re off…

Thought I’d mention this to Neville at the social media influence conference, and here’s the result.

Thanks Neville! Fingers crossed you’ll be the first of many.

Today’s error message of choice

Something is technically wrong

What prompted this site

Thanks

Thank you very much for donating to the Twitterfund. I’ll keep updating the site with a running total of donations to date, so do sign up to the rss.

And I’ll send all the money received by 1 September through to Twitter, when I’ll also publish the total to date.

I’m not going to name any names, or list any donations - but if you’d like to add your name and how much you’ve donated to this page as a comment, then feel free.

• What is the Twitterfund?

  

• Twitter is fantastic. Let’s get that straight. It’s addictive, useful and fun.

  But it’s also highly tempremental. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. Which does no-one any favours.

  Following an original tweet from @zeroinfluencer I decided to do something about it.

  The challenge: to try and raise Twitter some money. By asking people who use it to make a small donation.

  On 1 September 2008 I’m going to hand whatever this site has raised over to Twitter.

  So please do contribute. And ask your friends to, too.

  Who knows whether or not we can have the same influence as the VCs (or the same amount of cash), but I hope we can influence the way Twitter develops for the better.

• Some smallprint

  I am nothing to do with Twitter. I just like it. I promise to keep any money donated safe (or rather PayPal will) until I hand it over in September.

  You'll just have to trust me.

  But if anyone knows any proper legal reasons why I shouldn't be doing this - please let me know, and I'll stop.

• Tweets about the Twitterfund

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