It’s official: Twitter to launch commercial accounts next year

The paid-for commercial accounts would offer extra services to help companies tweeting to understand how the service is working for them, providing analytics, statistics and feedback.  

The plans were revealed by twitter co-founder Biz Stone in an interview with the BBC. 

Stone stressed that the micro-blogging service would remain free at a fundamental level, on both personal and commercial fronts. 

Talking to the BBC, Stone said “You will be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account – get some feedback, some analytics, become a better ‘Twitterer’.” 

Stone also outlined revenue making plans from “licensing and syndication” schemes, such as deals with search engines Google and Bing.

 Twitter has undergone a series of changes recently as the micro-blogging service adjusts to the changing needs of its users.  

Twitter recently made a tweak to the core question looming over the box where members type their 140-character updates. The site had previously wondered: "What are you doing?" Now it asks: "What's happening?"

The change reflects Twitter's growth from a simple social tool between friends to become a combined news aggregator, marketing tool and real-time search engine. 

Stone explained in a blog post, Twitter "has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates."

The new question is one of a series of changes Twitter made over the last several weeks. The service introduced a feature called "lists," which allows users to sort the people they follow into different categories, such as "work" and "friends."  

Twitter also changed its "retweet" function, which allows users to rebroadcast a post to their own followers while giving credit to the original author.

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