Twitter, Last.fm, and Facebook Considering Various Payment Models

Three major players in the Social Media space – Twitter, Last.fm and Facebook – have announced plans to monetize a portion of their services in an attempt to make up for lagging ad revenues.

Twitter, the micro-blogging site that is currently free for all users, is in the process of building subscription-based commercial accounts for businesses and power users seeking greater functionality. Though these add-on services have yet to be decided on, many suspect that we should be seeing better analytical and tracking tools, enabling interested users to extract information about who is reading their feed and what is being said about them elsewhere in the Twitter environment.

Last.fm, a streaming online music service, will soon begin charging its members outside of the US, UK and Germany a monthly fee slated at around $4. The site’s current features include internet radio, videos and artist pages alongside social networking tools. Additionally, the company will no longer be allowing unofficial applications to access the Last.fm API. While we suspect that the content providers are behind this move, it also affords the site a way to better manage – and cash in – on the music being provided.

Facebook is apparently entertaining the possibility of offering their developers access to virtual currency. This universal payment system would conceivably enable funds to flow seamlessly between all applications and games available on the site. Though this could be a potential boon to Facebook and its developers alike, this idea is far from concrete and for the time being at least, remains very much in the “maybe” pile.

Silicon Valley Insider: Twitter Confirms Paid Pro Accounts On The Way

GigaOM: Last.fm’s New Semantic: A Focus on Costs, Revenue

CNET: Facebook launching virtual currency? Don’t get too excited