Nate Westheimer of The Silicon Alley Insider has this to say:

Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space, where, despite years of hype, no one has much of a head start.

Link to the article: How Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion In A Year

I have to admit, coming from the Internet financial services space, the thought of this actually happening scares me slightly, given the serious lack of stability and the manner in which changes have been made at Twitter with less than complete communication. But at any rate, they have a lot of money to throw at the problems, so I am rooting for them to get things right. It just hurts. :)

Westheimer makes some good points. Twitter is carrier/provider-agnostic and has amazingly terrific user and market penetration. Just as I send you a direct message today by typing "d yourname hi how are you?" I could pay you using syntax like "p yourname $20."

But getting from here to there is an whole other story. It's far from trivial to create a financial transaction and accounting system, especially one that scales to the sizes required (but it certainly can be done).

It's an appealing and interesting idea and one that warrant some real thought. As someone who comes from the the online banking software, infrastructure and security world, I can see the market need as well as the challenges from many fronts that will face any company that finally jumps fully on-board the micro-payments and mobile-payments train. A number of good, well-funded companies have given it a run before with limited success. It's a complex problem to solve, but it's doable.

It sure sounds like a fun challenge, and there's a massive marketplace out there just waiting for someone to get it right. Note the operative verbiage there - Doing it well is critical to success. The fact is there's no room for "scale later" in this game.

What do you think? Would you pay people via Twitter if you could? Would it be useful to you?