Much to the disappointment of many people yesterday, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams did not unveil a new and much-anticipated advertising platform during a SXSW presentation. Instead, he introduced a new service called @anywhere, which while interesting wasn’t what the audience expected or wanted.

So while Twitter continues to work away to create a viable revenue model, here’s one take on how Twitter is going to make money – an approach called “The Five A’s”.

1. API: Twitter recently disclosed it will charge for “Firehose” access to its API. While the company had already been quietly charging for the API, Twitter finally came out with a plan that made sense given the value and amount of data used by third-party services. You can expect Twitter to roll out more API packages.

2. Advertising: An platform based on relevant and contextual advertising is another no-brainer. While Twitter had resisted the idea, resistance proved futile so advertising will become a reality at some point soon. Unless it’s over the top, Twitter users won’t complain.

3. Acquisitions: With more than $100-million of venture capital, Twitter can easily make several strategic acquisitions to expand its portfolio of services – services that could generate revenue. The potential targets include twitpic, Tweetdeck, Seesmic and Twitalyzer.

4. Affiliates: Twitter could generate revenue by entering into affiliate agreements with other service providers looking to tap into Twitter’s audience – sort of like what Wordpress does withits hosting partners.

5. Alliances: Along the lines of what Twitter has already done with Google and Microsoft, Twitter can drive revenue by entering into partnerships with larger companies that want to offer Twitter as part of their services. This is kind of alliance that could involve services such as @anywhere.

Any other ideas on how Twitter can make money?

Is today the day that Twitter finally unveils its advertising platform?

TechCrunch reports that Twitter CEO Evan Williams will be interviewed at SXSW, providing the perfect platform to announce that Twitter will be rolling out advertising on its search engine (search.twitter.com) based on relevancy.

If Twitter does go public with its much-anticipated advertising strategy, it would probably takeover the spotlight from the location-based service crowd (Foursquare, Gowalla, et al), which had been expected to be the talk of the town.

I’m always on the look out for new tools to find new people to follow – something that Twitter.com has yet to really embrace. Some of the leading tools include Mr. Tweet, which suggests new people to followed based on your friends and tweets.

Another interesting tool is TweepML, which serves two purposes by helping you find new people and groups to follow. What’s nice about TweepML is the ability to follow individuals, follow everyone within a group, or follow a group itself. Depending on your needs and interests, TweepML offers nice flexibility.

To use TweepML, you search for a topic or select one of the popular lists. Here’s a search for “social media”:

And here’s a particular list with each member within that list. At this point, you can follow the list or select people within that list to follow. Each member of the list has their Twitter profiles, which makes it easier to pick off select people.

Bottom Line: TweepML is a solid service to find new people or lists to follow. If it could be improved, it would be great to not have to provide your username and password every time you want to follow a list or people on list. In the scheme of things, this is more of a small quibble given TweepML’s value.

There’s probably a tool out there that addresses this problem: how do you efficiently and effectively get rid of people that you follow who start to lose their Twitter mojo?

It’s people who you start to follow because their tweets seem interesting, entertaining or valuable. Then – for some reason – they begin to tweet about hangovers, their cat, sleeping habits and the weather. In other words, they get annoying. How do you flag these people to put them on Twitter probation?

One approach might be a rating system for tweets. If someone’s tweets start to go downhill, they could be given a poor, one-star or thumb’s down rating. If a certain number of poor ratings are accumulated, this person would automatically be un-followed.

While there is some manual involvement in this process, it would be one way of keeping your flock of friends the way you want them.

What do you think?

The folks at Twitter sure know how to have fun!

Earlier today, they caused a stir by quietly changing the “Update” button to “Tweet”. This caused a huge stir within the blogosphere based on the theory that anything Twitter does is news.

Just when the “Tweet” news started to get heavily reported, Twitter switched it back to “Update”.

Maybe Twitter is just upset because the SXSW conference is happening later this week, and all anyone wants to talk about is Foursquare and location-based services.

Twitter, you had your SXSW moment in 2008; it’s time to let someone else enjoy the spotlight.

Here’s a screen capture via TechCrunch.

When it comes to Twitter, I’m a link monster. Most of my tweets include links to blog posts, news articles and online services; and most of the people I follow fall into the same camp.

Twitter just passed through the 10 billion-tweet barrier. According to GigaTweet, it will only be 202 days (approx. Sept. 15) before the 20-billion barrier is cracked. Go, Twitter, Go!

In less than two days, the number of tweets will surge through the 10 billion barrier, according to GigaTweet. On a daily basis, there are now more than 50 million tweets/day.

Big news from Twitter: it has officially launched its “Firehose” API in which third-parties can have 100% access to Twitter’s data. Twitter proclaims the announcement as something “Enabling a Rush of Innovation” but you could easily argue it is “Enabling a Rush of Revenue” as Twitter will start to charge for different API packages.

Much like the recent announcement that Twitter will start placing advertising within search results, the concept of charging for access to its API is a no-brainer from a business perspective. It’s something that I have argued in the past that Twitter should have been actively considering given the value that the API provides to third-party services looking to use the API to build businesses.

As GigaOm’s Liz Gannes points out, the big question now is now much Twitter will charge for its API. It makes sense that smaller users will likely pay nothing or a modest amount, while high-volume API users (Tweetdeck, Seesmic?) will pay significant amounts.

Twitter said there are seven companies now using Firehose – Ellerdale, Collecta, Kosmix, Scoopler, twazzup, CrowdEye, and Chainn Search. Twitter did not talk about pricing structures said “these companies range from funded startups to part-time, one-person operations so we came up with a fair way to license access that scales with their business”.

What we’re finally seeing from Twitter is the foundations for a business plan that will generate enough revenue to justify the venture capital that it has attracted. Generating revenue from advertising and its API is something that Twitter could have introduced months ago but, for whatever reason, it decided to wait until early-2010 to do it.

Maybe the time is finally right, or maybe Twitter’s investors have put the hammer down, and make it clear that it was time for Twitter to quickly evolve from a popular project into a viable business.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Gives Firehose Access To New Companies – What Are They Going To Build? (thenextweb.com)
• Twitter Firehose – Congrats to Twitter! (oneriot.com)

If you’ve been curious about the variety of services that enhance the Twitter experience, you have probably given some of these services access to your Twitter account. It’s been a trade-off accepted by many people who want more from Twitter other than the basic functionality offered by Twitter.com.

Over time, however, many of these services are probably no longer used but they still have access to your Twitter account. While it’s unlikely bad things could happen, it’s good idea to manage these connections so that you know who has access.

Managing these connections is easy. Log into your Twitter account, and then paste this URL into your browser: http://twitter.com/account/connections. You’ll see a new page with the services that have access to your account.

To de-activate access from a particular Twitter service, just click on “Revoke Access”.