Twitter's Biz Stone: No pay model planned

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone shot down the concept of a paid model for the messaging service and reiterated that the company will get its infrastructure right.

In an interview with Jennifer Leggio, our new addition to ZDNet, Stone dismissed the suggestion that Twitter use a pay model to bolster its architecture. Stone said:

It is very important that Twitter remains free for people to remain connected. Some people are suggesting a paid model so that we can improve the service but money is not our issue; we have plenty of money. It's about getting the right architecture in place and boosting reliability. We want to keep it free.

Obviously architecture was a key topic for Stone. Among the takeaways:

• Stone's big priority is reliability, but Twitter is interested in adding new features such as grouping.
• Bringing third-party applications isn't a priority right now.
• Stone isn't concerned about so-called Twitter killers like FriendFeed because the service's fate is dictated by its own uptime.

We definitely don't want to disappoint our users. But I do not think its right to have our innovation and progress be driven out of fear of what might happen; that isn't a healthy way to work. Getting the reliability issues resolved so we don't disappoint our current users is critical and we know our success is directly affected by our reliability.