Twitter is going to enable commercial accounts!

Whether that exclamation point is due to excitement or trepidation depends entirely on your point of view.

Twitter plans on providing premium services — such as certified accounts, detailed analytics, and business-oriented applications — and charging businesses for their use. It is Twitter’s first foray into a real revenue-generating model and would seem to make sense, given how many companies are eager to reach Twitter’s more than 40 million unique users.

But is Twitter ready? The service is still notoriously unreliable with regular hacks and security breaches being reported (some potentially quite serious), not to mention the irritating and still too-often-seen Fail Whale. Twitter can’t even seem to protect its own intellectual property.

Assuming Twitter can provide stable, secure service while also providing tools with real-world business value (including detailed metrics), then this is potentially good news for many businesses. Twitter offers a unique way to communicate with customers, one that doesn’t require a major investment of capital, other than intellectual of course.

But I think many businesses are taking a “wait and see” approach. You know what happens when you assume…

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