Assuming Twitter can sort out its technology problems, I think I might have a business model for it. I feel though that it may be a bit presumptuous of me to think this given that greater minds (read the comments at the link) than mine have tried and apparently have so far failed to find a viable business model for the popular microblogging service. Not least because I actually haven’t jumped on the Twitter bandwagon myself just yet.

So just what is this business model? Well, as we all know, Twitter is all about people. As a user you follow people and people follow you. But what if you could follow not just people but objects as well? Objects like products, services, websites etc. Anything that someone has an interest in promoting and which one or more people might be interested in getting updates (object-tweets) about.

Now you might think that this would lead to spam and this is a legitimate concern. But what if object owners needed to sign-up for a different type of account to do object-tweets and risked getting their normal accounts deleted if they used them for object-tweeting, a.k.a spamming? This way, an object-tweet account is obvious to all users as such and only those who wish to follow that object will add it as a friend - or whatever the equivalent term is in Twitter parlance.

So on to the money. Object-tweet accounts could operate under a freemium model whereby the object-tweet account holder gets a certain number of free tweets per month and pays a premium for the ability to send and receive more tweets about the object per month. Why limit both send and receive? Well as I stated above, I don’t use Twitter but from what I know, it appears that people can send tweets directly to other people either as original messages or in response to a previously received one. If this is indeed the case then it should give object-tweeters an additional incentive to pay if the number of tweets that they can receive from users or fans is also limited in along with the number that the object-tweeters can themselves send.

Just to take the idea a little further, I envision product and website owners placing widgets on their websites that enable people to send them tweets related to those products. The same widgets could show recent tweets about the product etc.

I suspect that some or most of the above already exists in some form with Twitter but the idea I’m proposing is to formalise and monetise it, which by the way may prevent the sort of spamming problem that Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins of Mashable fears could happen when Twitter eventually goes mainstream