• Bloomberg News, Tuesday, June 23, 2009 1:30 PM

In an interview with Bloomberg, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says Twitter is finally on track to generate some revenue this year, as companies like Dell, Whole Foods and Starbucks use the micro-blogging site to communicate with millions of customers. "The idea is if they are getting value out of Twitter then we could add more value to what they are doing and we could get some revenue," Stone said, declining to give sales estimates. "We think we'll get to something this year, however simple, that shows we're making some money."

One potential revenue source, he said, is verifying Twitter accounts, so users would know that they really are following brands like Whole Foods or Coca-Cola. Another idea is selling statistics to businesses detailing the effectiveness of their tweets, or offering multiple accounts to large businesses with many branches. Stone said the company was focused on growth and was not entertaining any acquisition discussions.

The latest figures from comScore peg Twitter's user base at 18 million users, making it the third largest social networking site behind Facebook, with 307.1 million users, and MySpace, with 126.9 million. Twitter has held four rounds of venture funding since its start in 2007 and isn't currently seeking more funds, Stone said.

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