Twitter brings forward plans to charge commercial users

The micro-blogging service has brought forward plans to turn its popularity into revenue by next year, Stone told Reuters via email, saying the company has hired someone to create a number of commercial products.

Stone said: "We have lots of time for experimentation with regard to revenue generation, so we'll probably be trying a few different things this year.

"We think there will be opportunities to provide services to commercial entities that help them get even more value out of Twitter."

Amid the buzz about Twitter's efforts to figure out how to make money from its user base -- 7m people used the site in February according to Nielsen Online -- other companies are trying to exploit the service's popularity.

On Monday, Microsoft and online marketing company Federated Media launched ExecTweets, a website allowing users to keep an eye on Twitter messages from business executives.

Also this week, CRM provider Salesforce.com launched a customer relationship management application for Twitter.

The application, called Salesforce CRM for Twitter, is designed to help companies find customers who are going to the Twitter community to solve product problems rather than calling customer service.

It will form part of Saleforce.com's Service Cloud platform.

Read Gordon's Republic blog post -- Amazon talking to Twitter?

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