• D: All Things Digital , Tuesday, January 27, 2009 11:30 AM

According to various reports, Twitter, which has been featured prominently in the news for breaking stories like the plane crash in Manhattan's Hudson River, is raising another $20 million in a round of funding valuing the company at $250 million. Kara Swisher worries that the Web 2.0 startup, which has no revenue source, is getting a little cocky: "Twitter folks are always going on about how they don't need money since the burn rate is so low and because they could turn on the revenue spigot any old time they want to," she says. "Well, Twitter might want to ask Facebook about how burn rates can rise quicker than you think and how hard it is to get that pump of revenue truly going in a sustainable way."

As such, Swisher says the microblogging sensation might want to reconsider selling to Facebook, a deal that it abandoned late last year. For starters, Twitter and Facebook would "fit nicely together, creating the most powerful universal address book ever." Secondly, thanks to the economy, Facebook isn't going public anytime soon, and the idea of Twitter going public is absolutely "laughable." Thirdly, some larger company will probably buy Twitter soon, although it would probably be happiest and most autonomous as part of Facebook, Swisher says.

GigaOm's Om Malik disagrees. He thinks Twitter "needs to swing for the fences," which means competing with social networks like Facebook to create a new, more open, "more democratic." ecosystem of services built using Twitter. In other words, Twitter has the opportunity to become its own platform, one that could rival Facebook.

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