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Twitter to turn a profit in 2010?

At a recent news conference in Tel Aviv, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, remarked that new advertising capabilities and strategic acquisitions will put the company in a position to finally turn a profit during 2010. As someone who has watched Twitter gain $155 million in funding over the last two years, it has always been very interesting to see just how this company will find it's way to profitability if they indeed don't go the route of being acquired. While the company is keeping the details to themselves, Twitter's new advertising platform is generating a lot of chatter in the social and capital spaces, and for good reason. Advertising generally is a very intrusive form of outbound marketing that has not found wide spread success in the social market (yet, at least). Stone did mention that advertising on Twitter will take a "non-traditional" form, and while that may be true from his standpoint in juxtaposition to traditional advertising efforts online, Twitter users will ultimately decide just how "non-traditional" this advertising is, especially since it will likely further clutter our already cluttered stream of updates. And yes, I am making the assumption that it will be embedded within the stream. In order for advertising to have any value to marketers, their messages must be able to hit the 80% of Twitter users that are using other applications (TweetDeck, iPhone, Seesmic, Blackberry, etc) to interface with the Twitter community. More interesting for me is the role acquisitions will play in making Twitter profitable. Since the early days, Twiiter has opened up their platform and left much of the creative development to developers, who have in turn not only created applications with richer, more useful interfaces (from my standpoint), but have more importantly created applications that allow brands to follow and respond to what people are and aren't saying about them. Social media has become the single most important force in Online Reputation Management (ORM), and the business-oriented applications that facilitate the follow-and-interact process, particularly across various social mediums, are particularly valuable to the market. Acquisitions of this nature could prove very beneficial to Twitter, especially if they are able to enhance the capabilities of these applications in ways only Twitter can. In terms of looking at ways Twitter currently spends it's cash and the potential for vertical integration, SMS technology could also provide some very interesting benefits by eliminating or re-organizing a large amount of their current costs. It will be interesting to see if they do anything in this space in order to help boost the benefits advertising can bring next year. So there's my two cents. What do you think about the acquisition possibilities for Twitter? Where do you think they will align themselves in order to secure long-term profitability? Or, should they just sell now to the highest bidder, particularly since they recently announced their search engine integrations with Bing and Google?