Over the past year, Twitter has seen one hell of a growth spurt. I first signed up to twitter about 2 years ago under the account @closetcase, but after 197 updates and only 22 followers I decided to give up.

Then, after closing my previous blog back in last April, I decided to give Twitter a second chance, and haven’t looked back since.

Since then I have witnessed how twitters status as the next big thing in social networks has sharply climbed to new heights. Thanks to people like Barack Obama (who used twitter for his presidential campaign), and Stephan Fry (who has almost become somewhat of an ambassador for the website) more and more people are signing up to use the service, including many high profile celebrities.

Over the past few weeks however, this seems to of exploded in the UK with thanks to the BBC. Now, I know the BBC have used twitter themselves for a while now, but TV and Radio presenters have now started flocking to the service, and after talking about it on their various shows have drawn in many thousands of their audience to the service as well.

This may all seem well and good, but the problem is, can twitter continue to survive with this kind of growth?

Currently, Twitter doesn’t actually make any money. They simply survive on generous amounts of funding from venture capitalists who see the people potential in Twitter. But, just how could they make money from a service that basically tells people what you are doing?

Well, the first obvious route to go down would be advertising. Facebook implemented advertising and has done pretty well with it, but twitter has such a clean, almost sterile feel to it that advertising would somewhat dirty it up and most probably wreak the site.

So what other alternatives are there? Well, one I would quite happily get behind and support would be to implement a Pro Account option.

Popular sites like flickr and last.fm offer such accounts, and a small percentage of users don’t seem to mind signing up. I personally have both a pro account on flickr, and a subscription account on last.fm, and for the extra benefits you receive in return, don’t mind paying out at all!

so what benefits could twitter offer a pro user? well, for starters here are a few of my suggestions.

Guaranteed failwhale free experience:
its not happened so much recently, but in the past twitter was always suffering from down time, and thus the appearance of the infamous fail-whale. Pro users could be put on a priority server guaranteed to be active during high demand periods, allowing them to continue tweeting and not letting down any of their followers.

Increased/unlimited Api calls:
some people may not know this, but if you access twitter through some client or service that take use of the API, then you are actually limited to a maximum  of 100 requests per 60 sixty minute time period. This is fine for most people, but a high user during a high demand period may require more. A pro user could have a much higher allowance than a standard user.

Higher priority in searches, or the public timeline:
Pro users could be given a higher ranking in search results just as Google gives higher priority to the people who pay for higher search results. Also, pro users tweets could be more prominent in the services public timeline. Both options would give pro users a greater potential audience.

Mobile support:
I am not too sure on the status for the rest of the world, but here in the UK twitter deactivated the option to allow SMS notifications to be sent to your phone from twitter. This was all down to issues with costs and mobile networks, so SMS notification in the UK were stopped. A Pro user could have these back, and even if it was just limited to replies and direct messages I am sure it would be a welcome return.

Increased user profile:
A pro user could also have an increased user profile given them the ability to state a bit more about themselves. One thing I personally would like like to see implemented would be the ability to save previous avatar images, so you can easily switch back and forth between old and new ones as and when you choose.

Anyway, they are a few of my ideas, and I am sure other people could think of some more. Personally I think that implementing a pro account option to twitter would be the best way that the website could monetise there service, and finally start being in some money.

By guestimating that twitter must have in the region of 15 million users, and assuming that only 1% of them sign up to a pro account costing something like $25 a year, then we are looking at $3.75m a year. That’s only if 1% of users signed up. 5% would bring in nearly $19m a year. not bad for website that’s making nothing at the moment really!

I know I would sign up - would you?