Twitter Announces New Business Center

Yesterday, Mashable posted details and screen shots from Twitter’s beta testing of Twitter Business Center. The Business Center toolkit will expand the Verified Accounts program to include brands and organizations and enhance business accounts’ profiles with four tabs: Overview, Business Information, Verification and Contributors. The Contributors tab gives businesses the ability to add multiple users to a business account so that they can tweet on its behalf. The toolkit also allows businesses to accept direct messages, even from people they don’t follow.

Only a few accounts have been upgraded to the beta and twitter will roll Business Center out to the masses on a gradual basis.

The Business Center toolkit is launching one month after the company announced that they are ready to start trying to make money. Twitter will sell "Promoted Tweets," which will work like “Sponsored Links” on Google and Yahoo.  

While the new media income model isn’t surprising, what will be surprising is how it will work. Like many of you, I spend less time on Twitter.com and most of my Twitter time on one of the many user friendly third party Twitter applications (I personally use HootSuite). I rarely visit Twitter because it is wonky to use, the interface is inefficient for business purposes, the pages load painfully slow, and then there is that “giant whale” of a problem with the site crashing when the site becomes "too busy." If users continue to support the Twitter app cottage industry, who will be viewing promoted tweets on Twitter.com? I’m hoping the savvy NY Report readers can comment below and help me understand.

Could the toolkit be an attempt to get more Twitter users to actually use twitter.com? And do we have more cool features to look forward to? I hope so.