[blantonl]

God Dammit! (Sorry...but) I cannot believe that a business such as this is not able to fund itself! I own and operate a highly successful, bootstrapped, Web based business, and when I see funding that comes in in the millions I'm sometimes shaking my head.

Really.. two hundred million? If you haven't made it now, I can't imagine you'll make it in the future unless you drastically change your business model. drastically!

My position is if you can't monetize your business soon after coming out of the gates, you are just living a dream.

It appears there is absolutely no real concentrated approach to monetizing Twitter's business model. This seems analogous to AT&T providing free SMS's to all customers, and then trying to figure out a way to monetize SMS's.

Thank God I don't have to even think about funding, much less multiple rounds.

[jonathanjaeger]

The faster the innovation the easier it will be for Twitter to block out competition in the future, not to mention keep a significant runway going for expansion. While this strategy wouldn't be good for the average successful startup, Twitter is obviously one of the top dogs in the web space right now so they have the luxury to REALLY shoot for the stars. We obviously can't tell what's in their innovation pipeline over the next two years, so it's hard to make a judgement call like that. I mean look at Facebook, they don't see any reason to become very profitable yet.