I was going through this article at ReadWriteWeb about a teacher using twitter in her class. Here’s an excerpt from it-

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom. Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class.

The article continue, talking about the experiment and results, including a reply from the teacher herself. Down there, RWW have pointed out a strong limitation of twitter i.e. the short life span of a tweet. As of now, twitter search returns only those tweets that are younger than two months. This is something that should be taken very seriously if twitter search is to be developed into something definitive. With twitter developing to be something like what electricity is now for us (said by Jack Dorsey, co founder at Twitter), the potential it carries is huge; as twitter search is the real time search of people’s opinion, advice and thoughts.

I was just thinking, what if there was an option to preserve tweets even after two months. Like, selecting a unique hashtag for your tweets that should be archived and paying a reasonable sum to twitter for this. As simple as that.

Apart from archiving tweets for a longer time, it gets twitter some revenue. I don’t usually engage in ‘what could be a possible revenue model for twitter’ discussions, as almost all the suggestions that arise stand against the fundamental aspect of twitter – Simplicity, and also I believe the people at twitter are capable of keeping up. But this one, about paying twitter to keep tweets longer does nothing to hamper the sweet simplicity of twitter, I believe.