Twitter gets more business friendly

Twitter is testing a way to let businesses better use the popular microblogging service in what could be a future money-making opportunity.

Twitter is testing a way to let businesses better use the popular microblogging service in what could be a future money-making opportunity.

Twitter is testing a "Contributors" feature that enables companies to have accounts that workers can share when it comes to firing off text messages to customers or others.

Accounts bear the names of businesses, but workers fielding questions or announcing developments would get bylines identifying their tweets.

"It enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account" Twitter said in a post at the San Francisco firm's website on Tuesday.

"The beta will be released to a limited subset of folks for some time so that we can get an idea of how the features work from a system perspective."

Twitter said it will launch Contributors publically after it "kicks the tires a bit."

The announcement comes as short Twitter text messages referred to as tweets are being incorporated in real-time results in Internet search engines.

Twitter has been working on ways to make money from its globally popular service, and revenue producing ideas mentioned to date include selling premium accounts that businesses could use for marketing or image building.

Twitter has won millions of users since it launched the service that allows users to pepper one another with 140-character-or-less messages.

(c) 2009 AFP