Twitter chief gives Murdoch pay-wall plans the Fail Whale

Life is not tweet for Murdoch
Life is not tweet for Murdoch

Co-owner of Twitter, Biz Stone, has spoken about Rupert Murdoch's pay-wall plans and believes the owner of News Corp's ideas would "fail fast".

Discussing the matter at an event in London, Stone likened Murdoch's radical plans to turn the Sun and the Times websites into subscription-based models to when the car took over from horse, saying: "I am sure that during the transition from horses to automobiles there were some people bemoaning the loss of horse transport."

Do something radically different

He also noted, according to the Guardian, that Murdoch "should be looking at it as an opportunity to do something radically different and find out how to make a ton of money out of being radically open rather than some money by being ridiculously closed."

This isn't the first time an internet powerhouse has commented on Murdoch's mission to make his company's content online pay.

Just this week Jay Adelson from Digg also criticised the media moguls plan, explaining: "Don't expect the consumer to necessarily pay for news. I agree that someone has to pay for it – completely agree. But I think news aggregators, frankly companies like Digg, have to include a piece of that. If it costs money to produce that, where are you going to source it from?"

As well as erecting pay-walls over his major websites, Murdoch is also looking into getting his content de-listed from Google.

Marc Chacksfield

Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.