Dear Twitter,
I really like you. It took me some time before I was willing to give you a chance. I didn't 'get' you and your curt replies for the first few years, even though my friends raved about you. I joined in order to prove myself right, and that you were a waste of time. But the harder I tried not to like you, the more you grew on me. At some point I moved from h8 to <3, and now I can't imagine being separated.
Which brings me to the reason I'm writing you something a bit longer than 140 characters. Recently you've been hard to reach. I am used to having to put up with the Fail Whale, but this is different. I'm constantly hitting rate limiting, retweets not working, I get "Something went wrong..." all the time, or more often than not, my actions produce this enlightening error message:
I'm pretty good at debugging my own issues, but this doesn't give me a lot to go on. Now, I realize that this is the complaining of a guy who is using a free service, and shouldn't expect things. But, truth be told, I'm to the point where I do expect this service to work, and I'm not alone. See, in other parts of your UI, I seem to be getting ramped up information, and it's clear you're pretty actively "improving" my experience:
So let's get to the point here. No matter how well you "promote" these, I'm not going to buy. I don't watch ads on television, I don't have ads in my browser, and I'm not using Twitter in order to find new ways to buy things.
Lots of relationships get ruined over financial arguments. It doesn't have to be that way with us. So back to my earlier admission that I'm expecting lots but not doing my part:
I would pay cash money to have a "pro" (or even "always working") account with Twitter.
Stop worrying about how to integrate ads into Twitter, and let your users support you. We already pay for Flickr, Dropbox, Vimeo, etc, and those of us that value your service will be willing to do it with Twitter, too.
One of my friends likes to say that you guys drove your clown car into a goldmine. Watching you flail and fail with business models is depressing, when the one obvious one is being completely rejected. I'm an adult. I have a job; and I use Twitter for my job. I'd pay for this because it's a useful part of my online experience. And while some applications of this business model are dead (the NYT won't be getting my money, since Twitter is my newspaper), in your case I think it makes a ton of sense.
I'm not a business genius, and make my living by giving away software for free, so I'm in no position to give financial advice. But! While I won't pay for a lot of things on the web, I'd pay for this, and damn it Twitter, you need to fix your stuff. Let's help each other.
How do I give you money?
Yours,