I have written an article about this that you may find interesting.

During my reserach for this article – i gathered that Twitter weren’t actually receiving $1Billon dollars. But the stake that private equity companies bought for about $250million valued the total company at $1Billion.. this was essentially going to be used to pay the new board of directors they have employed for the ‘strategic vision’ i.e. how to make Twitter profitable without advertising too much..

personally – i feel that Twitter is over valued…

Please have a read of this article – and see what you think?

http://behindthefinance.blogspot.com/2009/10/twitter-baffling-valuation.html

All the best.

Paul

But, to charge the users seems absurd. I mean, look at Orkut, Facebook and even Myspace, I don’t see any PAID users unless of course you are thinking of marketing biz through affiliate and paid advertising.

Yes, the service has just to do with receiving micro-blog info from the ones you follow and you ‘tweet’ your lines so that others can read. Other than that nothing substantial has taken place, yet its a big HIT.

If the numbers are right and if Twitter has already earned a substantial amount, then even I am baffled to know WHY do they need a loan or valuation amount?

Maybe they are thinking in terms to expand their social characteristics? Add some features that integrate with other social medias?

Well, we got to wait and watch.

As for the post above, I agree with getting rid of spammers and things of that nature, a one time fee would work for that, but it would also reduce regular users as well, I personally wouldn’t pay it because I’m not big on Twitter.

The number of SPAM accounts on Twitter has mushroomed since I started using. The follower count for the celeb Twitterers has also mushroomed well out of proportion–thanks to the automatic following that Twitter SPAM accounts begin with.

I can watch my follower account drop fairly quickly and then track it back–sure enough, the same SPAM accounts started by the same abusive SPAMmer got deleted or inactivated by the Twitter minders. I never follow them back–they, invariably, feature a shortened link, begging for a click. No thank you.

Twitter needs to charge a one-time set up fee, and the credit card used MUST be the name associated with the account. Nicknames are fine, but that nickname should be linked to the billing name on the card you set up your Twitter account with. It would eliminate SPAMmers (one account per card, two accounts per business credit card, etc), it would cut down on the spoof accounts for fake celebs, and it would make who you follow and who follows you far more important.

I presume that popular services like twitter, facebook, linkedIn need a LOT of horse power to support thier large user base

These operations need more in hardware than software! And if you couple that with a team of programmers then expenses gather up dramatically.

Would be hightly interested to know details on what hardware they have setup in order to operate such a “small” 140 character service!

In terms of what they’ll do with the investment, one can only assume that it will include expansion of the capabilities of their service, improvement of the stability of the platform (which is desperately needed), and implementation of whatever model they’re choosing to drive towards in terms of growing a revenue stream.