Twitter may not have a vibrant business model but it sure has no problem attracting heavyweight investors.

The latest person to step up in a major way is Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, who bought a $300 million stake from an early Twitter investor as part a strategy “to invest in promising, high-growth businesses with a global impact.” (More details on the New York Times)

You figure with so much interest, Twitter could do an IPO. Of course, an IPO means you have to disclose your financials, which Twitter may not want to do given it’s probably spend a lot more money than its generating.

Chances are that Twitter never does an IPO. Instead, it will be snapped up for billions of dollars by someone looking for buy a major social media foothold

Curious about how Twitter makes money? Henry Blodget did an interview recently at the Insight conference with Adam Bain, Twitter’s chief revenue officer, which I suppose is the guy responsible for helping turn Twitter into a business big enough to support its sky-high valuation and growing workforce (800 and counting!)

Is advertising going to help Twitter create a business? Well, it will help, although you do have to wonder whether Twitter can generate enough revenue to justify its sky-high valuation.

eMarketer suggests Twitter’s ad revenue to hit $339.5 million by 2013 from $139.5 million this year.

So Twitter has 100 million active users. Big number but what does it mean?

It means there is a huge community of people who use Twitter because it has some kind of value.

It means while Twitter still hasn’t gone mainstream, it’s pretty darn popular, and not just in North America.

It means another micro-blogging service looking to take on Twitter is going to have a difficult time getting a foothold.

It means having 100 million using doesn’t mean you have a vibrant business or guarantees a business plan.

It means people are completely happy to use a free service.

It means Twitter could probably sell itself to someone looking for a large user base it can monetize.

What does 100 million mean to you?

Note: Apologies for the blogging absence. Work and summer vacation kind of got the best of me.

Here’s a cool info-graph of Twitter’s growth over the past five years via Visually.

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by visually via

Links: http://tweetlevel.edelman.com/
Description: A new measurement service from Edelman that calculates someone’s influence by be slicing, dicing and crunching their Twitter data. It lets people discover their TweetLevel “score”, and displays the number of followers, tag cloud, who influences them, who they influence, and who retweets them. TweetLevel also lets people search by topic based on influence, popularity, engagement and trust.
Our take: An interesting and user-friendly tool for PR agencies and brands looking to get a better handle on who they should be targeting. More of a “lite” product than something offering robust features and analytics.

Twitter is a strange bird these days.

It not only has decided to wage a puzzling war against its developer ecosystem, which has helped the Twitter platform flourish, but Twitter also appears intent on making few of them rich unless they really have to.

Case in photo is the growing speculation Twitter will launch its own photo-sharing service (Twang, anyone?) at a time when there are a few leading players – TwitPic, YFrog – that would be terrific acquisition targets.

Maybe Twitter doesn’t want to spend any more of its venture capital booty until it comes up with a viable way to generate revenue. But it does seem strange to build vs. buy in this situation.

The wonderful thing about Twitter is it’s fast and easy to post a tweet. You think of something, fire off 140 characters (or less) and a tweet is published to the world.

The downside is tweets are easy and fast to do, which also means that firing off a tweet that may not, in hindsight, be such a good idea is also possible.

The great case in point is SportsNet broadcaster Damian Goddard, who tweeted his opposition to same-sex marriage. In the name of free speech, Goddard had every right to talk about his position, irregardless of whether you agree with him or not. The problem is Goddard is a public figure who works for a high-profile sports network. Now, SportsNet has apparently fired him.

It begs the question whether Twitter is a good forum for someone such as Goddard to express his personal views, or whether he should be expressing them publicly at all in any forum.

I have to admit there are times when I see an article or blog post, which makes me want to fire off something critical or snarky. And there have been times when I have typed in 140 characters. But just before hitting post, my inner editor always comes to the rescue by posing the question: “Is this tweet really necessary? Is there an upside to doing it, or will it just cause unnecessary aggravation”.

It’s something Goddard should have seriously considered before he hit the “publish” buton.

Companies that acquire startups have a funny way of treating them once they’re in the fold.

Sometimes, it’s a perfect strategic fit that creates a win-win scenario: the startup thrives within the corporate “mothership” with plenty of financing and stability, while the acquirer expands the capabilities of its business to meet the needs of existing and new customers.

In some cases, however, startups get swallowed up and pretty much disappear to the point where you wonder why it was acquired in the first place. Some examples include Yahoo’s purchase of del.icio.us. Rather than enhancing the bookmarking service, Yahoo seemed to ignore it for years. Yahoo finally sold it recently the founders of YouTube.

For Twitter users, an interesting story to watch will be Twitter’s apparent acquisition of TweetDeck. One of the hot questions is what will Twitter do with TweetDeck, the most popular third-party service to read and publish tweets, after the deal is done.

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram makes the case that Twitter shouldn’t “pull the plug” on Twitter because it’s focused on power users, while Twitter.com is aimed at the broad market.

It makes a lot of sense given TweetDeck has far more features that Twitter.com, and meets the needs of different kinds of users. The only thing that TweetDeck that Twitter might not like is the ability to post to multiple social networks, including Facebook, Google Buzz and LinkedIn. Why make it easy for users to use the competition when a tool you own?

Of course, if Twitter did something radical such as remove the ability to use other social media services, many TweetDeck users might consider moving to Seesmic or HootSuite.

It will be interesting to see what Twitter does with TweetDeck. If an ideal world, TweetDeck is allowed to thrive.

It was probably the worst-kept secret within the technology and social media worlds but Twitter has acquired Tweetdeck for $40-million to $50-million, according to Techcrunch.

The deal makes complete sense because Twitter.com as a way to read and write tweets is a no-frills platform that loses many people once they get some experience and start to explore alternatives. TweetDeck is, by far, the most popular third-party service because it is feature-rich and user-friendly. Unlike Twitter.com, TweetDeck has diligently worked on improving, including the ability to post to multiple platforms.

Buying TweetDeck was a no-brainer move for Twitter but it took a rival offer from Bill Gross’ Ubermedia to apparently make it happen.

The question for TweetDeck users is how the software will evolve now that it’s part of the Twitter empire.

Will Twitter, for example, still lets users post on a wide variety of platforms, including Facebook, Foursquare, Google Buzz and LinkedIn?

Will TweetDeck stay completely free or will Twitter launch premium versions as it looks to generate more revenue?
What does TweetDeck being part of Twitter mean for rivals such as Seesmic and HootSuite?