So, here it finally comes – the beginning of Twitter monetization, under the guise of building out features that will help businesses. Fees are probably due soon.

“The feature we are beta testing is called ‘Contributors’ – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account,” posted a member of Twitter’s product team. “The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business-to-consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations.”

The beta test for this feature is for a limited number of users at the moment. CoTweet, which at this point might have been considered a competitor, is saying that it’s a collaborator on the project. CoTweet was created to enable multiple business conversations on Twitter for quite some time now. While not sharing all the details, CoTweet executives have said that this will strengthen and add value to its own product.

“While we aren’t at liberty to discuss the details of Twitter’s commercial offerings, it’s clear that there will be a continued need to provide collaboration tools necessary for businesses with cross-functional teams that communicate through one or more brand accounts,” reads the CoTweet site. CoTweet believes that its advanced work flow and history of conversations that enable two and even thousands-ways conversations will still be vital, and a nice mesh with what Twitter is about to roll out.

Center Networks’ Allen Stern explained how this Twitter functionality will work. “If you have multiple people posting to one user account, each of their usernames will show up in the “by” line below the tweet message,” he wrote. “Which basically means, “full business accounts are coming soon.”

It certainly would seem so.

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