• Wired, Tuesday, August 5, 2008 12:15 PM

The likes of Facebook and YouTube have shown that converting eyeballs into dollars isn't always easy, but Twitter, the wildly popular microblogging service, has taken the underwhelming Web 2.0 business model to a new level: it isn't just lacking a business model, it doesn't even want one. "At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan," says Twitter founder Biz Stone. Stone founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.

Such proclamations don't even faze VCs these days: just last month, Twitter received a new round of funding worth $20 million. Meanwhile, the company's user base is skyrocketing, up to 2 million users per month, more than ten times its total in April 2007. According to Compete.com, the microblogging service has some 200,000 active users sending more than 3 million updates per day. To be sure, rapid growth has been problematic for Twitter, as the service is frequently overwhelmed, making outages common.

Indeed, it's fixing these problems, and not revenue, that's top of mind, says Stone. "Unless we have a reliable service that works the way we think it should," Stone says, focusing on revenue "is really putting the cart before the horse." Further afield, Stone believes that Twitter could eventually become the de facto provider of real-time news, akin to a Reuters or a Bloomberg. "When you think of it that broadly as a utility, I think you can begin to imagine how big the potential is for Twitter as a commercial entity," he says.

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