Many of you may already know about this but Twitter is starting to add some new features. In the latest newsletter Biz Stone says it is "feature season".

This one is a basic search function. You can search for people, user id, location, bio and URL. Now you can find more people to follow and add to your friends list (or now called following list).

You must be logged in to see the new search feature. It is on the right hand side of the screen.

And here is a picture of the search results page. We searched for our Twittown profile ID . And found ourself with ease!

Twitter Inc. has launched a mobile version of their Twitter service. It presumably is meant for mobile devices to be able to access the twitter service directly through the web interface without any 3rd party client needed. We briefly checked it out and it looks to be a pared down version of Twitter formatted for mobile phones.  Here are some screenshots of the new service (taken from a Mac on Firefox 2). 

Twitter Mobile - Login screen 

Twitter Mobile - Logged in and sending messages

Twitter mobile is available at m.twitter.com  

David Chartier has a few ideas on how Twitter will make money as a company and he also briefly chats to Evan Williams from Obvious co. / Twitter Inc. about it. The quick overview of the ideas are:

1. Twitter Pro - Charge for some upgraded services
2. Merchandise - Sell stuff
3. Twitter for Business
4. Ad supported Forums
5. Advertising
6. Sponsorships

Also this comes to mind. Twitter must be giving the phone companies huge revenue in SMS charges. Ev has said in an interview (can't remember where) that they are actually paying these bills at a discounted rate. These are only the updates they send out. How many more people are sending updates TO twitter and generating revenue for the phone companies. Maybe there is a way to share in some of these profits. Difficult but possible if they can prove the volume of these messages.

The last way off the top of my head is data mining. They have all that data, they must be able to use that somehow. Someone must want it and find it useful if it is sliced and diced and presented nicely.