• D: All Things Digital, Tuesday, November 25, 2008 11:15 AM

In the end, Twitter decided not to sell itself to fellow Web 2.0 sensation Facebook, but Kara Swisher, who broke that story yesterday, wonders whether that was the right move. At least one of her sources thinks the decision not to sell was incredibly foolish: "If Twitter turned down 500m in stock, they should go see a shrink," the Internet exec said. Of course, not everyone agreed. Said another big Web player: "Why should Twitter hitch itself to Facebook's horse, when they don't have too?"

Still another exec responded with a more middle-of-the-road observation: "I think strategic buyers are going to be considered as options for all venture backed companies going forward. Additional rounds of financing are not the given they have been in the past few years. Liquidity is at a premium I've never seen before."

In other words, Swisher says, Twitter thinks it has plenty of "money and means and time" to transform itself from a cashless but enormously popular platform into a moneymaking killer app. Its growth is impressive: Twitter reached 6 million registered users in October, a 600% increase over the previous year. The microblogging service's emergence as the most popular means for mobile status updates is precisely the reason Facebook wanted to buy it. Despite what looked like a good fit, Twitter investors decided it was best to pursue a moneymaking strategy on its own.

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