Twitter: show me the money!

James Governor at RedMonk says

"Twitter is like walking to school with your friends and hanging out, while reading blogs is reading their homework."

That makes the Twitter a prime spot for making money since, as James points out, marketers would rather hit you while you're talking with friends and happy than when you're concentrating on some deep technical argument.

I hate the thought of ads being inserted into the Twitter stream. They would really get in the way of the conversation. Certainly Twitter could run ads on the sides of their pages, but that seems so obvious as to be wrong somehow.

Doc Searls makes a distinction between making money from something and making money because of something. For example in blogging, you may not make much money from your blog (although some do), but it's pretty easy to make money because of your blog (you get a new contract, a better job, and so on).

The same can be said of Twitter, I suppose, but because it's more like hanging out with some friends, I'm not really generating good will so much as developing relationships. While it's relatively easy for me to point to real money I've made because of my blog, I couldn't do the same with Twitter.

Of course for some, Twitter, and social networks in general, represent a way to broadcast--one more channel as it were. I admit, I post URLs of things I write in Twitter and Facebook. On the other hand, I enjoy when the people I follow point out things they're reading, thinking, or writing; that's part of what Twitter is for.

Twitter could be used to letting a select group of people in on a daily deal, special coupon codes, overstock situations, and so on. Someone has to be doing this already, although I'm not aware of it. To cash in on this, Twitter would have to facilitate the transaction, not just the notifications.

Also, I might pay a small subscription for tweats with information I need or can profit from. Financial data is an obvious one. More compelling would be tweats from a financial analyst whom I trust. Sort of like a realtime newsletter. Still, how does Twitter profit from this? I'm not sure they do; they're merely the conduit.

I have no doubt that someone will find a way to make money from Twitter. I'm not sure it will be the owners of Twitter, however (laying aside the eventual liquidation event). What are your ideas about how Twitter could be used to make money?