The British Royalty have started using Twitter well, sort of, anyway

The more things change, the more they remain the same. And it is true of the Internet age, British Royalty, and that ancient thing that drives all of us, money.

Recently, the British Monarchy decided that they too, like the rest of us mere mortals, should be on Twitter. You can check them out by visiting http://twitter.com/BritishMonarchy. When I did, they had 8,831 followers.

This is interesting from one perspectiveu2014there was a time when royalty did things first, followed by the plebeians. Now, it seems like it is happening the other way around.

Royal refrain

Of course, if you think that you can chat with the Queen on Twitter, you are mistaken the service, according to a spokesperson quoted in the BBC, is "...a news service rather than a personal voice."

In some ways, this is a bit of a boost for Twitter, which was recently snubbed by Rupert Murdoch, who said that people should "Be careful of investing here [Twitter]."



But the question remains what of money? Merely getting royalty on board doesn't make Wall Street smile they have even stiffer upper lips than the British.

Money matters

This is a question that everybody seems to be asking these days. In fact, some time back, Sony CEO Howard Stringer, referring to the likes of Twitter, said that, "A lot of people are doing very well making very little money."

Social networking today reminds us of where a lot of Web sites were in the days of the dot-com boom. In those days, getting traffic was all that mattered and the concept of profitability was given short shrift. Later, many companies collapsed because they had no firm idea for revenue generation.

Today, many social networks are in this stage. They are trying to get more and more people to join, but they are still vague on how they will make money. And this is crucial because VCs who are funding them will sooner or later turn around and ask, "Ok, bub, where is my return on investment?"

Tell me how

Twitter, clearly, has no idea of how to make money so far or rather, it is not saying anything right now. Their site says, "Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world."

Translation? We don't have any idea how to make money. Maybe the Queen will help them figure it out?

QUICK TAKE
>>The British Monarchy has joined Twitter
>>You can get news about their activities
>>But they will not be personally tweeting

How it began
Twitter began in a daylong brainstorming session that was held by board members of the pod casting company Odeo in an attempt to break out of a creative slump. At that meeting, Jack Dorsey introduced the idea of an individual using an SMS service to communicate with a small group, a concept partly inspired by the SMS group messaging service TXTMob.
Source: Wikipedia