SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (Bennington Vale Evening Transcript) -- After years of speculation and debate, Twitter announced on April 1 its first professional suite of microblogging services. The ubiquitous 140-character social broadcast tool will now provide targeted services for individual industries. Representatives from Twitter assured users that the costs for the professional solutions will remain low, with the bulk of the fees going to support content processing behind a client's server instead of through the cloud. "Without capturing advertising revenues, we need to find alternative ways to offset our overhead costs," said Frida Kline, a public relations executive for the technology innovator. "Also, Twitter will offer scalable character limits for these tools, up to 199 characters. We had to rebuild much our infrastructure and expand our server capabilities to accommodate this massive upgrade." The two newly launched flagship products are TwitScholar and TwitProcurePro.

Kline confirmed that the basic premise behind both offerings remains close to the core philosophy of Twitter: "If you can't get your point across clearly and concisely, you've failed to communicate effectively."

TwitScholar is an economical approach to helping public schools meet the increased demands of state and federal testing requirements. By eliminating the cumbersome paper processes of standardized tests, along with the challenge of subjectively grading essay tests that lend themselves to excessive interpretation, TwitScholar allows educators to program academic questions that force students to respond directly. There's little margin for error and virtually no room for "B.S. or fluff that fails to answer the questions," according to Kline.

Much of the grading can be performed by computer-based algorithms, automating and simplifying the otherwise time-consuming chore.

In the same spirit of eliminating word waste and confusion, TwitProcurePro is presented as an online capture system for agencies and organizations that rely on Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to bid their business.

"An RFP is intended to be a straightforward, no nonsense approach to gleaning meaningful answers to critical business questions, without enduring all that ridiculous sales jargon, hollow rhetoric and outright lies," Kline explained. "With TwitProcurePro, potential vendors have no choice but to forgo their sales fluff and get to the point. If they have something worth selling, they should spit it out. If they can't convince buyers they have a product worth considering in 199 characters or less, then they're probably just liars and shills."

However, Kline also admitted that some RFP questions may require proposal responses of greater complexity. For that reason, TwitProcurePro fields can scale up to support 199 characters of text.

"For example," Kline added, "if you're asking a technology provider to explain his implementation plan, he may need a little more than the standard 140 characters. But not much more. The point of the system is to stop the marketing insanity and uncover a vendor's true delivery capabilities."

Both products will be available for purchase after April 2 through the marketplace link on Twitter's corporate website.