Three years ago, Twitter considered offering subscriptions for its social media dashboard, TweetDeck. That service would have provided news alerts and analytics to customers willing to pay for a monthly fee, but it didn"t materialize.
Now, the company appears to be carrying on with its subscription push, if a new job listing is any indication (via VentureBeat). Twitter posted a job opening on its career portal in search for a "Senior Full-stack Software Engineer" who will join its new team, codenamed Gryphon. The listing reveals that the group is developing a subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future. It consists of web engineers working with both the payments and Twitter.com teams. The full-stack engineer will be responsible for Gryphon"s payment and subscription client work.
The team will be distributed across different locations including London, San Francisco, Boston, and New York. The subscription model is seen as a part of Twitter"s efforts to explore additional revenue streams beyond advertising, which primarily contributes to its income. It"s not clear, though, how the micro-blogging site plans to implement the subscription platform and what services it will offer.