I have been talking about a simple subscription platform for Twitter for 3 years now.

Incredibly, no one was listening, so we decided to just build it.

At 83 Degrees, we are no strangers to building businesses around "premium content." In 2002, we created the first large scale user generated content site that had a successful "freemium" model -- Webshots. At the time, the only other large content sites that made money with subscriptions were the WSJ Online and ESPN.com. We got close to 250,000 paying subscribers and learned a lot about the whole process.

Today, we are launching something called Super Chirp -- a system to enable the simplest form of paid content. It makes use of Twitter's social connections and distribution channels.

Two new words for the twitterverse:

chirp - a direct message sent via Twitter to a paying subscriber

subscriber - someone who pays a small monthly fee for chirps of information

The content, of course, is up to the publisher. Our hope is that Super Chirp will provide a means for people to quickly and easily enable pay-for information channels. These could be celebrity news updates, real-time data, or charitable micro-giving.

Internally, we are calling them "paid streams" -- if you have something to say that others might find valuable, then Super Chirp can let you try out your business premise.

All we did was connect the dots. The next part is up to you and others who can now start the process of building out a new portion of the paid Web.