&gt;  They also had a big talk about leaks and then went on to show 4000+ people the full product plans for the next year. Then, sorry, we&#x27;re firing a bunch of you. Oh yeah, don&#x27;t leak anything we just told you. :-O<p>I find this mindset frankly mind-boggling. I work for a significant corporation, and we recently changed CEOs. The trade press was reporting the change three months in advance; and anyone who cared to know about it on the shop floor probably did. But they didn&#x27;t <i>tell</i> us ... presumably because it would get leaked. Which it, of course, did anyway. It seems to be almost an unconscious corporate reflex to treat the bulk of your staff like morons.<p>My feeling about Twitter is that there was an opportunity to seriously monetise it around the moment it started getting serious traction for PR. The celebs had given it critical mass, and Coke and McDonalds had to follow.<p>Now, however, the shills are basically just given an enormous amount of free advertising space with a not-great premium option on top of that. (A promoted tweet is not as good as an embedded tweet in a &#x27;proper&#x27; news outlet, which will be part of the PR package, sold together to a client as advertising-equivalent exposure.)<p>They could still do something like start charging per tweet per thousand followers for content promoting a specific product or service (a made up back-of-the-fag-packet example, I&#x27;m sure there are better ways), of course, but it would be much harder given the expectations that have built up around what the platform is.<p>EDIT: clarity