Tuesday, April 21, 2009

AQA launches premium mobile micro-blogging service


AQA is one of those SMS Q&A services where you text in questions and it texts you back the answers. But now it’s launched a new service called AQA2U, which lets anyone set up a Twitter-style news feed that sends out the persons thoughts as texts to subscribers at 25p a time, up to a maximum of £3.50 a month.

That’s right, it’s basically getting people to pay for content they could get for free from a Twitter feed. Or, as AQA puts it, “AQA2U is micro-blogging with a business model”.

Grime star Tinchy Stryder is already using the service. I have to ask though, will consumers really pay for this? Considering the majority of people don't really want to pay for music these days, and given that Tinchy tweets lots on Twitter already, what on earth will be in his AQA2U feeds worth paying for? I have been a champion of artists endorsing technology and embracing alternative revenue streams, however, I do have my doubts about this one, but stranger things have happened…

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