Twitter has announced how they plan to make money. It does not look like one silver bullet. There is nothing like Adwords that propelled Google to IPO. Twitter has a number of initiatives. That feels a bit weak, hedging bets, not quite sure what will work. But time will tell and Twitter has been marvelous at making doubters eat their words.

Our theory is that online advertising and ecommerce are converging (for reasons explored in this post).

Facebook is clearly moving down the ecommerce track. They are using Like to hoover up recommendations from across the web, understanding that recommendations are the key to ecommerce.

While Facebook clearly has its ecommerce act together, Twitter still seems to be figuring it out. @EarlyBird seems to be the key to their ecommerce strategy. We wrote earlier that:

"Real Time changes the rules. With real time you allow for both "freshness premium" (buy now, the fish has just been caught/the dress is just off the runway/the band has just releases the song) as well as "staleness discounts" (the fish is still edible but a bit old, the clothes are functional but no longer fashionable)."

But real time ecommerce will need a semantic engine. That means Twitter Annotations. How will Twitter connect these two dots - EarlyBird and Annotations?

Image courtesy Flickr and Kooby.

@EarlyBird 101

OK, the early bird catches the worm aka the shopping bargains. Cute, huh? Well Twitter is nothing if not cute.

The basics are explained on the Twitter Help Center:

"Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community. Our advertising partners determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price."

Enough theory. What can you do as a buyer? Follow @earlybird. Hmm, not much in that timeline. Looks like help for advertisers. And Disney is there selling discount tickets to Sorcerer's Apprentice. So why not just follow Disney?

And who will follow multiple vendors in their timeline? The reality is this has to be done via the Twitter API so that developers can create personalized agents that scan for offers that fit your criteria.

That is where @earlybird will have to connect to Annotations.

But for now this is just theory. Both @earlybird and Annotations look half-baked at the moment. Twitter seems to be banking on the developer ecosystem to make this into a real product.

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