Under the old rules of Twitter tradition, you "re-tweeted" another user by placing the letters "RT" before the quote and after any commentary you yourself added, like so:

If you use the new built-in re-tweet system, the original tweet would be copied into your stream under the byline of the original tweeter, like so:

The obvious problem: You lose the ability to actually say anything about what you're quoting if you use the new system. Also, all your followers are going to get a strange and potentially confusing avatar of someone they're not subscribed to in their stream.

On the bright side, this system is great for Twitter Inc. "Retweets potentially reveal very interesting data," Twitter CEO Evan Williams writes in a blog post about the new re-tweeting feature. Indeed, the feature offers a metric with which to rank tweets and thereby the results of Twitter searches and Twitter users themselves. Twitter could sell this data, provided free by its users, to the richest and most favored bidders, just like the microblogging startup did with the actual content of tweets.

The feature also helps Twitter's celebrity power users. Writes Williams:

RTs can actually be easily faked, which has become a form of spam, wherein well-known people are shown to be promoting something they never twittered about.

But, hey, if you don't like this new re-tweet thing that is so awesome for celebrities and Twitter Inc., you can always opt out. As Williams writes (emphasis from original), "you can turn off Retweets for everyone you follow (individually)." So just click "OFF" 200 times? Sounds super-easy!

(Top pic: Twitter co-founders Williams and Biz Stone, by Mathieu Thouvenin.)

Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

Step one: Slowly destroy the Suggested User List, a list of Twitter's favorite websites which is used to populate the accounts of new users. CEO Evan Williams now says ""I desperately want to kill it or evolve it," according to Business Insider. A few weeks ago, Williams said, "we don't think it's our job to editorialize" through the list, according to NYU professor Jay Rosen.

Indeed, the list gave the microblogging startup tremendous unchecked power to instantly bestow large audiences on various Twitter publishers, yet it was assembled somewhat haphazardly, in a process that involved a "gut check" with "a couple folks" at Twitter Inc. The company reportedly and apparently removed TechCrunch publisher Mike Arrington from the list after, over Twitter's loud objections, he published internal Twitter documents obtained from a hacker. TechCrunch appears to have since been restored to the list; the below chart from TwitterCount shows the long fallow period in Twitter follower growth for TechCrunch when it was apparently out of Twitter's favor:

Step two: Provide search data to rivals. The value in Twitter is in its real time "fire hose" of tweet data. But the company has guarded that data jealously, providing it to only some companies who request it, and then often at a cost of thousands of dollars per month. But Twitter is now nearing a deal to finally sell access to its "full feed" to Microsoft for the Bing search engine, reports Kara Swisher of All Things D. The company is also believed to have been in talks with Google for a similar deal. Sharing with such large competitors is quite a bit of letting go — albeit with financial compensation — for a company that has treated its real-time content feed as a major strategic asset.

It would appear that Twitter is learning a lesson crucial to all sorts of small businesses: if you want to be successful at something, you have to give up on being successful at everything. One would think a company founded on tiny, 140-character status updates would have learned the benefits of limits much sooner.

(Pic: Williams, earlier this month, by Bruno Pin.)

In an interview with Wired's Steven Levy, Williams lashed back at two traditional media fogeys who pooh-poohed his company's potential at the Sun Valley schmoozefest in July. Barry Diller, of IAC, and John Malone, the satellite TV mogul, said the microblogging service would never make much cash.

"I didn't argue my case," Williams says. "But all the Internet guys there were laughing at those media guys. Are you kidding? Do you understand how money flows to the Internet? When you know that Twitter is a vehicle for directing information and traffic to large audiences, you realize there's obviously a huge business."

And, hey, that's coming from a guy who made four whole million dollars last year, old media people, so you better listen up. These guys have spreadsheets that would blow your minds.

That, at least, is the best explanation we can come up with for why Ev and Sara Williams are selling one house, buying a second and building a third, all at the same time. Their old penthouse was a two-bedroom in a gritty part of San Francisco Mission District, while the home they just bought reportedly has three bedrooms, a guest house and is in the yuppie-family haven of Noe Valley. The acquisition, reported today by SocketSite, can be confirmed with a search on the records website PropertyShark:

The Noe property, on the market for a full year and designed by architect Owen Kennerly, seems like a sensible place to wait out the construction of the new home; a comfortable interim house like this should allow the couple to complete their own house without rushing the job in response to the pressures of a new baby, fast-growing internet startup and cramped apartment. Plus, they got it for 16 percent under list.

That, at least, is what we'd tell ourselves if we had $2.4 million to drop on a temporary pad.

UPDATE: Williams writes, ""We're not building another house. (Also, the penthouse isn't in the Mission.)" The first assertion is very odd: The Times quoted Williams in March saying "we're building a modern house;" at that point the house below had been finished and listed for sale for four months. Perhaps the project proved to overwhelming. We've asked for clarification.

UPDATE: Williams writes, "we *were* building a house."

Pictures of the house below via SocketSite.

Front.

Kitchen.

Guest house.

As for Williams, he's been silent for a few hours, presumably holding his wife's hand and coaching her breathing, but it's a virtual guarantee that one or both of them will be updating their Twitter feeds during the labor and delivery process. Here's hoping everything goes well.

Pic via Sara Morishige's blog

[via VentureBeat]

She's already set up an account. Ashton Kutcher, a big Twitter user, is scheduled to appear on the show Friday to talk about Twitter. Ex-dating columnist Julia Allison is trying to recruit other Twitterers for the show. And videoblogger Robert Scoble has posted that Oprah is going to be doing her first tweet.

With so many Internet celebrities on board, how can it not be happening?

After a lot of ruckus last week about Google or Microsoft buying Twitter (they're not — yet), Twitter investor Fred Wilson came forward to say that the company wants partnerships, not a payday. And he invents a new metric: "tweet views," or the number of times someone sees a message posted on Twitter, whether it's on the Twitter website, a cell phone, Facebook, or the countless number of Twitter apps people use to read and write tweets.

What does a tweet view profit Twitter? Nothing. In making up "tweet views," Wilson is returning to a practice of the late-1990s dotcom boom: imaginary measurements for fictitious businesses.

Why blame him? Anything which can be measured can be managed. And people's expectations for Twitter — A $500 million Facebook acquisition! No, make that $1 billion from Google! — are utterly unmanageable. Twitter has next to no revenues, and no plan for making money. Pressed on this issue, Williams and his cofounder Biz Stone say that they're watching how people use the service and will come up with something based on that. Translation: They're making it up as they go along.

It's far better for Twitter to be valued based on people's imagination of what it might become, rather than the reality of what it is — a "poor man's email system," according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, or instant messaging 2.0. (AOL hasn't figured out how to make real money off of AIM, either.)

So what's Williams's big news tomorrow? Here's a preview: The day after tomorrow is even bigger.

This is by design. For years, Twitter has been criticized for drowning its users in a sea of trivia. CEO Ev Williams has countered these critics by saying Twitter is all in how you use it. It is an empty vessel of meaning; if it stays empty, that's your fault.

There's a cottage industry of people, mostly publicists and marketers, trying to prove that Twitter is useful, and occasionally they sucker a journalist into writing about how people used Twitter to find service stations with gas during a shortage in Atlanta. (A couple of years ago, they'd have written the same story, but using Google Maps. A decade and a half ago, they'd have written the same story with this new thing called "email" as the technological hero.)

Here's the real moral meaning of Twitter: A man has built a chair which automatically posts a message on Twitter every time he farts.

Back to the scientists. Their concern isn't so much with Twitter as with any rapid-fire media, including television and videogames. Human beings are wired to notice physical pain pretty much right away. More subtle problems, like emotional pain, take six to eight seconds to recognize. ScienceDaily summarizes the study and quotes one of its authors, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang:

The study raises questions about the emotional cost-particularly for the developing brain-of heavy reliance on a rapid stream of news snippets obtained through television, online feeds or social networks such as Twitter.

"If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states and that would have implications for your morality," Immordino- Yang said.

Immordino-Yang stresses that she doesn't blame social networks — just ones that shoot rapid-fire updates at us, like Twitter and the redesigned, Twitter-like Facebook. Does Twitter render us blind to our fellow human beings' pain? Do we use it to numb our own pain? I'd worry about it, but I have a thousand tweets to catch up on.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that Google and Twitter are in some stage of acquisition talks — either early or late, depending on who you ask — for a sum well above the $230 million price venture capitalists placed on Twitter when they invested in February.

It would be a second Google payday for Twitter CEO Ev Williams, who sold Blogger to Google in 2003, a deal which proved lucrative after Google went public a year later. And he has the benefit of having negotiated a sale to Google before.

Williams's Twitter, which lets users post short updates about whatever thought crosses their minds, is being hailed by the Valley's groupthinking bloggers as a revolution in "real-time search." Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, occasionally one finds some bit of timely news posted by a Twitter user. (It's hardly a threat to established newsgathering operations, because more often than not, what's posted on Twitter is just a link to some page on CNN.com or nytimes.com.)

The venture capitalists who sank tens of millions of dollars into Twitter, despite its lack of any sincere interest in making money, have cleverly talked up this "real-time" angle among journalists eager for a trend story. The notion of real-time anything is inherently appealing to the Ritalin addicts of the tech and media worlds, for whom instant gratification both takes too long and wastes 15 percent of a 140-character message. And that has gotten Google worried that it might be letting a rival grow in its own backyard.

Already, the buzz has translated into investments and hires for Twitter. It recently poached Google's top designer, Doug Bowman, and hired a computer scientist, Pankaj Gupta, whom Google and Facebook were wooing. Even though Google has laid off hundreds recently, it's still hiring engineers. One more reason to buy Twitter that boils down to pure shame: to plug an embarrassing brain drain.

And one last reason: To spare Twitter's executives the chore of talking about their nonbusiness. On Thursday's Colbert Report, cofounder Biz Stone had to go through a humiliating explanation of how Twitter is building "value" instead of "profit":

Ev and Sara being Twitter's First Family, they've been teasing the news out on the microblogging service. We're curious: When Morishige referred to Williams's "Christmas present" in a tweet last week, did she mean a bit of procreation? Do the math: She wrote that she "ordered it" in early December, and the baby's due in August.

Poor Williams! He's just the latest target of Winer's wrath. The irascible Internet fussbudget has gotten mad at Jason Calacanis for being self-promotional, mad at Internet commenters who do not acknowledge his contributions to the Internet, mad at Twitter for not doing what he says, and mad at Hillary Clinton for being alive. (We've also long suspected that he is secretly mad at the New York Times because they will not hire him as a columnist and run his verbal spew unedited.)

But Winer's latest rant is hilariously hypocritical.

Williams's sin, according to Winer, is playing favorites with Twitter's "Suggested Users" page, a feature meant to help bewildered new Twitter users navigate the messaging service's real-time, 140-character spasms of pointless puffery. He writes:

I pour a lot of effort into Twitter, and while I wasn't in the top tier of users, I was solidly in the second tier. I wasn't doing the things you have to do to get the most followers, or I didn't have a powerful media presence like Leo or Shaq to get me up there. ... It's now approaching 20,000, which I am proud of, but it's not very much compared to the numbers of some people who did nothing other than be friends of Evan Williams to get hundreds of thousands of followers. ...

Think about it this way — do you know who wrote Apache or PHP? Do any of them have the power to deliver so much flow to an installation of their software? Imho, that's exactly the relationship Twitter should have with its users. Or the phone company and users of phones — they shouldn't jump into a conversation and say (for example) "We know someone really cool you would probably like to talk to. We're connecting you to them now.

Makes sense! Who would want the phone company to do that? Except Winer did the exact same thing himself with his own blog-software company, Userland Software, in 2003, writes former employee Rogers Cadenhead. Moreover, unlike Twitter's Williams, he actually took money to promote a blogger — former MTV veejay Adam Curry. In 2003, Curry wrote:

Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults. ...

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

Williams hasn't said anything about charging for placement on the Suggested page, but it can generated tens of thousands of new followers a day for featured Twitter accounts. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis — yes, the one Winer feuded with — has offered to pay $250,000 to get featured on it. Which makes us think: Winer isn't mad at Williams because he's playing favorites. Winer is jealous because Williams is far more effective at playing favorites than Winer will ever be.

The house news came as an afterthought in a first-person New York Times profile of how Williams came to run the fast-growing Internet message-broadcasting service, which some 6 million people use to blurt out 140-character updates to anonymous strangers online.

Also shortchanged in the profile: His spouse, who has gone by the unduly drab name of Sara Williams since they wed in 2007. The two met at Google, and one could argue that she's been far more important to his subsequent success than the Google shares he got. All that we're told about her:

My wife, Sara, a designer, keeps me balanced. We're building a modern house that we hope will be done by 2010. The design is a challenge - that's why she's in charge.

The cliché is that opposites attract, and the Williamses certainly fit the part: Awkward Midwestern farm boy meets chic Mexican-Japanese-Chinese designer; scatterbrained nerd meets detail-oriented perfectionist.

Read how Williams describes his first company:

We figured out how to create Web sites, but I didn't want to work on other people's projects. I had no business running a company at that time because I hadn't worked at a real company. I didn't know how to deal with people, I lacked focus, and I had no discipline. I'd start new projects without finishing old ones, and I didn't keep track of money. I lost a lot of it, including what my father had invested, and I ended up owing the I.R.S. because I hadn't paid payroll taxes. I made a lot of employees mad.

His second company, Pyra Labs, which gave birth to Blogger, was no better. In the wake of the dotcom bust, Williams ended up running Blogger by himself, with a trail of exasperated employees left behind him. That he managed to rebuild it, hire more people, and sell the mess to Google was a miracle.

Twitter, too, suffered because of a bad management decision Williams made: Appointing bike-messenger fanboy Jack Dorsey as the service's CEO.

Not that we're convinced Williams, who fired Dorsey and took his post last year, is a better choice. The company still has no source of revenues. Investors wink and tell the business press that they know exactly how Twitter will make money. (What they really mean, but will never say: By selling itself to Facebook, Google, or some other sucker.)

We have a better idea for who should run Twitter, if it has any hopes of being a serious business: Sara Morishige Williams. Her sole public involvement with the company was an eight-month stint designing Twitter's new office. But her professional background is in human resources, an area where Twitter could obviously use help. (Remember the incident where a clueless Twitter employee broadcasted the names of 186 rejected job applicants?) As Williams himself admits, he can barely cope with email. Sara's LinkedIn profile details how she scheduled 45 interviews a week, and a former coworker gushes:

She is dedicated, commited, detail-oriented, pro-active and fun to work with. She easily commands the respect of peers and is able to communicate effectively senior management.

If not CEO, why not make her chief operating officer at least? Let her mind the details Williams is so obviously loathe to handle while he hobnobs with Ivanka Trump at the White House. In perfect seriousness, it makes no sense to have her spending time designing the couple's house when Williams's business so obviously — no, desperately — requires a ground-up rebuild.

(Photo by evhead)

We're still waiting for a more thorough after action report, but for now, here's TOMS Chief Shoe Giver (yes, that's his actual title) Blake Mycoskie, who blogs this comforting thought, "The administration really does want our input, each gave their personal email addresses and encouraged dialogue."

According to CNET's Caroline McCarthy, other attendees included "Kluster founder Ben Kaufman, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh, Toms Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, Threadless exec Jake Nickell, marketer Josh Spear, former Googler Chris Sacca, and the one everyone's making the jokes about—Twitter co-founder Evan Williams."

Below, some more visual evidence.

Mycoskie and Threadless founder and Chief Strategy Officer Jake Nickell.

Trump and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who, now that he's done saving the economy, will be appearing on Celebrity Apprentice this Sunday.

The group is ringled by ragingly egocentric former Google peon Chris Sacca. It also includes Twitter CEO Ev Williams; Josh Spear, the "youngest marketing strategist in the world"; and Jake Nickell, the "chief strategy officer" of online T-shirt vendor Threadless. (In Silicon Valley, when board members are not prepared to fire a founder outright, they often give him a meaningless title involving "strategy.")

It's one thing for the Valley's moneymen to maintain the polite pretense that the twentysomething entrepreneurs they fund are brilliant creators whose searing intelligence makes up for their inexperience, naïveté, and general ineptness. After all, if they pretend long enough, they can peddle whatever shlocky website their protégés have cooked up to an even more gullible private-equity investor or mutual-fund manager. 'Twas ever thus. We call this scam "venture capital," and in good years, it is mildly profitable.

Let's review: Williams's company isn't even trying to make money. Spear is a social media marketer — in other word, someone who gets paid to chat with his friends online all day. Nickell clothes the indolent hipsters of Brooklyn.

And Sacca? He's the worst of all. In five years at Google, he never rose higher than the level of manager, despite an assiduous track record of sucking up to CEO Eric Schmidt. People assume that he's rich from having joined Google before its IPO — yet as he once defensively whined to me in an email, he actually isn't. So this is someone who managed to be present at the greatest wealth-creating event of our decade and yet failed to actually make money. He is now advising startups.

For Barack Obama to take these lackbrains' advice when the world needs saving? This is an outrage on the scale of the bank bailout. Perhaps he thinks there's some photo-op value in being pictured with so many young, hip types — proof that as old American industries die, new, Twittery ones are being born. But these companies won't create meaningful numbers of jobs. At best, they'll make some VCs rich by flipping them to some unlucky buyer. At worst, they'll go spectacularly bankrupt. Inevitably, that photo of Obama and the twits will surface as news of their failure breaks. Stop this meeting, someone, before they taint our most perfect president forever!

The horror is, of course, unfolding in real time on Twitter. Avert your eyes.

The Times of London asked experts about the Twitter phenomenon, and concluded that people use the Internet message-broadcasting service to send 140-character "tweets" relating their most mundane activities because of an underdeveloped sense of the self:

The clinical psychologist Oliver James has his reservations. "Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It's a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are. Nobody would Twitter if they had a strong sense of identity."

"We are the most narcissistic age ever," agrees Dr David Lewis, a cognitive neuropsychologist and director of research based at the University of Sussex. "Using Twitter suggests a level of insecurity whereby, unless people recognise you, you cease to exist. It may stave off insecurity in the short term, but it won't cure it."

For Alain de Botton, author of Status Anxiety and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Twitter represents "a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. It's like when a parent goes into a child's room to check the child is still breathing. It is a giant baby monitor."

Politico checked in on the service's use in the nation's capital, and found that the vainglorious pundits and lawmakers who crave attention in print and on TV have also flocked to Twitter. The media at large, a class of people who define themselves by the size of their audience, have turned themselves into the Twitterati, building up lists of "followers" as a reassurance that they have an importance that will outlast their dying employers.

But the narcissism of today's overcommunicators transcends one little startup, and goes far beyond the makers of media. The Washington Post profiled Julie Zingeser, a 15-year-old girl who sent and received 6,473 texts in a single month. Her mother worries about Julie's ability to focus. Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor, worries about deeper issues:

Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wonders whether texting and similar technologies might affect the ability to be alone and whether feelings are no longer feelings unless they are shared. "It's so seductive," she said. "It meets some very deep need to always be connected, but then it turns out that always being trivially connected has a lot of problems that come with it."

Always being trivially connected sounds like Twitter's business model. The company is now worth $230 million, according to its investors. Some narcissistic executive with more wallet than brains will likely pay more than that to take it off their hands. And some day, perhaps Williams, the Twitter CEO, will no longer have to explain what he does for a living. Twittering will seem as natural as drawing breath. By then, we may have even forgotten that there was more to life than constantly proving we're alive.

(Photo by moriza)

It is an unprecedented amount for a company unburdened by the messy reality of taking money from paying customers. Twitter has raised more than $20 million in two previous rounds of financing. And its new investors, which include Benchmark Capital, an early backer of eBay, and IVP, a less distinguished Silicon Valley financier, are only getting 15 percent of the company for their $35 million, a much larger amount than rumor had Twitter raising. Here are bullet points from an email that Twitter CEO Ev Williams (above) sent to investors:

* Twitter has raised a new round of funding from Benchmark and IVP
* Yes, the round was $35M
* Major existing investors include USV and Spark
* Existing investors also includes CRV, Digital Garage (from Japan), and an impressive stable of angels
* Benchmark's Peter Fenton will be joining Twitter's board of directors
* Twitter is committed to building a strong, independent company

Cofounder Biz Stone claimed in a blog post that the company had "significant capital" from last year's $15 million round with Spark and USV. Translation: Twitter has spent a large part of that sum in the past nine months — but it's not completely broke.

A strong, independent company is a longshot, considering that Twitter must pay cell-phone companies to deliver its short text updates to users' cell phones, while not pulling in compensatory revenues. Twitter's best hope is a buyout — and what its investors have just done is give it a better hand to bluff with, until it suckers some larger Web company into figuring out how to turn Twitter's 140-character-long updates into cash.

New York magazine sent Will Leitch to explore the crazy phenomenon of Twitter and why it's not making any money. Cofounder Biz Stone told him worrying about money was so New York. How San Francisco!

The nonchalance Stone (left) and Twitter CEO Ev Williams (right) display about making money seems incomprehensible from elsewhere in the country. Wall Street and Detroit are supplicants in the nation's capital, dependent on billions of dollars in government largesse for their continued existence. Unemployment in the state of California is at 9.3 percent, nearly two percentage points above the national average, and the state is running out of cash.

Such is the genius of the Bay Area's startup factory: Money's not the point. The region is still awash with money, and doesn't know where to put it. One venture capital firm, Accel Partners, recently raised $1 billion in new funds. What it's short on is ideas.

And Twitter is an attractively simple idea: short bursts of text broadcast to the Internet from the Web or a cell phone, meant to update a set of friends on what the user's doing. Jack Dorsey, the engineer who came up with the notion and was Twitter's CEO until he was ousted from the job last year, Twittered two years ago, "One could change the world with one hundred and forty characters."

Twitter could be the future of news, the future of communication, the future of marketing, the future of just about anything! That's because right now, it's nothing. It has 6 million users, a pittance compared to Facebook's 150 million; Facebook's status updates duplicate Twitter's main function, and it has a real business in advertising.

But Twitter has raised $20 million in venture capital, and reportedly is raising a new round that values the company, which has $0 million in revenues, at $250 million. That is an infinite price-to-sales ratio.

In the topsy-turvy world of venture capital, that makes sense. Why? It is infinitely easier to tell stories about a company that has no revenues than one that has some revenues. Zero revenues means blue-sky possibility. Any business success charted from here on out will look like a rocket ship, up and to the right.

How dull, by contrast, to talk about a company going from $100 million in sales to $200 million. A mere doubling? Boring! During the dotcom bubble of the '90s, investors punished companies that were making money, because they assumed they weren't investing enough in growth. CNET's then-CEO Halsey Minor once noted this in 1997: "We announced that our revenues were lower, our losses were higher and our stock went up $3. The Internet is its own phenomenon."

That phenomenon now lives in Twitter, whose early investors will surely succeed in getting others to buy into their dream. Simply adorable.

(Photo by Hugh Kretschmer/New York)

'Twas always thus. Twitter was never really a company; it was a feature invented at another forgotten startup, spun off into its own venture. The programmer who came up with the idea for Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was named CEO, while Twitter's better-known backer, Ev Williams, a Webhead who struck it rich by selling Blogger to Google five years ago, dithered about how much he wanted to be involved.

Despite Williams' seeming indifference, Twitter took off — so much so that a crush of new users strained its servers, to the point that the service became famous for its technical incompetence. (The "fail whale," a cheery cetacean icon displayed when Twitter's website was unavailable, now appears on T-shirts in San Francisco and Brooklyn.)

In its business affairs, too, Twitter is proving incompetent. Most Web 2.0 startups run cheaply, but Twitter faces large bills from cell-phone companies which charge it for forwarding text messages to cell phones; the more it grows, the more it pays. And it has yet to announce publicly a way to make money.

That's not to say it doesn't have a scheme. The latest one we've heard floated: Twitter would charge companies to have verified Twitter feeds, so users would know that a message from, say, ExxonMobil really came from the oil company. (It's not as hypothetical as it sounds; a Twitter user inexplicably impersonated ExxonMobil this summer.) Verified accounts might then pay Twitter for every message they send, and also get prominent listing in a Twitter directory.

If that sounds like utter nonsense, the fever-dream imaginings of a desperate business-development executive high on whiteboard-marker fumes, that's because it is.

With no real hope of making money on its own, Twitter's best hope is a buyout. But its executives have handled that poorly, too. Dorsey botched talks with Yahoo and then Facebook; he didn't even tell his own board of directors he was talking to Facebook about a proposed $500 million acquisition. After that, he was fired as CEO and replaced by Williams, but stayed on as chairman, a nominal job which doesn't require his presence at the Twitter office. One prominent Silicon Valley investor is fuming that Dorsey is still on the payroll at all.

This Mickey Mouse operation is the future of news? That's not the most frightening prospect. Even if Twitter were competently run and profitable, the end result is an unreadable jumble. Look closely at the coverage, if you can call it that, of the Mumbai attacks on Twitter. Sitting at their desks in the U.S., most people had nothing to add except to observe that Mumbai used to be called Bombay — the kind of message that makes you wish Twitter's length limit was zero characters, not 140.

As more users join, the Twitter feed becomes filled with more and more noise; repetitive retweetings, back-scratching praise, and self-congratulation. A set of amateurs celebrating each other not for the quality or insight of their reporting, but its brevity, swiftness, and modish form of delivery. You read it here on first. Unless you heard about it on Twitter.