In a blog post today, twitter founder Biz Stone lamented the official position of twitter on monetization, which is that:

"The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue. However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling. We're going to leave the door open for exploration in this area."

This posting has been catching a lot of heat on the blogosphere.  Mostly this heat is coming from embittered, napoleonic creatures that apparently have little else to do except sit around and wait until Techcrunch writes about Twitter... so that they can then write things like "twitter sucks!" and "twitter is over."  I normally attempt to defend Twitter in these threads, but it can be a little overwhelming.  But blogosphere chatter isn't what I want to talk about in this post.

What I want to talk about is how Twitter can monetize.  I know it seems that everyone has their own brilliant idea about monetization, but I don't think that throwing my own into the fray can hurt.  In fact, I think these ideas are pretty much on-point.  But then again, I thought of them, and why would I think of ideas that were not on point to me?  But I digress.

1. Charge users for vanity @'s.  I think this would be the simplest way to monetize corporate access to Twitter.  All they would have to do is create a process for corporate authentication in which trademark verification occurs.  And then if an account is created that conicides with a verified trademark its use of Twitter is not free. 
2. Charge for access to real-time search.  "No one is going to buy the Cow if you give the milk away for free".  Unless you have been under a rock (or you don't live in the tech community *gasp*) then you are aware that real-time search is the new black.  And Twitter is Karl Lagerfeld.  Or Michael Kors.  Or apparently Isaac Mizrahi (he just got a new show on Bravo).  Either way, having users pay for access to Twitters vast real-time search information would drive revenue from not just corporate users, but also bloggers, journalists and people who are super interested in how often #Oprah is used.
3. Partner with brands and creatives to create official Twitter videos.  Imagine a video that showed up in every single Twitter users profile each day.  You could even tweak it by allowing the user to filter topically.  Just put a gChat-sized video above the "Home" tab on the right hand side of the Twitter page, and run the video.  It can be "sponsored by ____" and would get a bajillion views.  This would only work to enhance the user experience and since video CPMs are radically higher than display/richmedia/banner ads, would drive vastly larger sums of revenue.

So these are only 3 ideas of how to monetize Twitter.  And none of them involve in-stream ads, banner ads or display ads.  Intentionally.  Because including these ads would affect the user experience, which is really the core of Twitter and where it derives its value.  And that would be a bad idea.