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Well, it looks like Twitter will actually do it.

In an interview with VentureBeat on Thursday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone elaborated on the company's goal to put out a revenue model before the end of the year. He said that yes, it will involve offering paid accounts to businesses that use the microblogging platform for marketing, customer relations, publicity, and what-have-you. That's something Twitter has been hinting at for about a year now.

There's not a whole lot of detail available. But paid accounts will definitely involve statistics and analytics that aren't available through Twitter's existing application program interface (API), and possibly a whole separate "commercial API" for business-related applications. This adds to a move earlier this year in which Twitter started rolling out an account verification process for prominent users.

In fact, Stone told Marshall, the first test phase of these accounts is already under way with a few companies. Considering Twitter's status as marketing heaven, this is probably a product that will sell quite well. And since Twitter, which has raised $55 million in venture funding, has yet to turn a profit, that's good news.

Marshall points out something important: "It might be hard to tease out who is using the service professionally and who is using it for personal reasons, and then charge them for it. So the idea is to build a set of features that people are willing to pay for." Stone made it pretty clear in the interview that ordinary Twitter users won't be forced to pay up.

Another interesting tidbit: Stone said that Twitter had been looking to acquire social-network aggregator FriendFeed, which was picked up by Facebook earlier this month.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at the Reuters Technology Summit on Monday that the ubiquitous microblogging start-up isn't considering an advertising-based business model at all.

The whole "we'll make money by offering corporate accounts of some sort" mantra has been talked about by Twitter's founders quite a bit recently. But until this point, Stone and co-founder Evan Williams haven't been quite this explicit in ruling out advertising altogether.

"There are a few reasons why we're not pursuing advertising--one is, it's just not quite as interesting to us," Stone said at the event.

Man, it sure is nice to be so high in Silicon Valley's pecking order that you can rule out a business model just because it's boring!

The other reason: Hiring an ad sales staff is labor-intensive, Stone told Reuters. Ads can also be intrusive to users. Now that makes a bit more sense.

The long-awaited Twitter business model, which the Reuters article describes as "various add-on tools and services for the businesses and professional users of Twitter," should be in effect by the end of the year.

You'd think, based on what the blogosphere is saying about dual sets of numbers in Advertising Age and VentureBeat, that Facebook has a new reason to freak out about revenues. Namely, signs point to the fact that the third-party developer platform that Facebook launched two years ago now collectively makes more money than the social network itself.

Well, of course it does.

From some of the headlines, you'd think that it were some sort of Silicon Valley equivalent of humans creating robots that eventually outstrip them in intelligence. While it's sort of amusing to think about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg battling evil robots (cue up some Flaming Lips here), this actually should be a pretty unsurprising conclusion. Estimates indicate that the platform applications put together may make as much as $500 million in 2009, with the advertising-based Facebook pulling in $350 million to $500 million depending on who you ask. (It's a private company. They're allowed to answer that question with nothing more than sneaky smiles.)

Let's look at the latest (vague) figures. When Facebook announced the debut of its long-awaited "verified apps" program last week, the company said there are now more than 52,000 applications on the third-party developer platform--and counting. That's a lot. In other words, if the Facebook platform were a standalone business, I should certainly hope it would rake in a significant amount of money.

Granted, we'd have to crunch a lot of numbers and deal with a lot of variables in order to figure out the exact operating expenses and headcount of the platform. Some applications are created by lone developers living rent-free in a basement, whereas others are created by app development companies that employ dozens of people and pay hefty amounts of cash for office space in those trendy post-industrial lofts in dot-com-friendly neighborhoods.

It gets more complicated. Some apps are the Facebook-inhabiting arms of much bigger social media companies, or are branded advertising or marketing campaigns on behalf of corporations that otherwise have zilch to do with tech. Then there are the development firms, consultants, agencies, and countless investors who also have a stake in it. Facebook itself, last time we checked, still had fewer than 1,000 full-time employees.

Conclusion: I don't know how many people and companies can claim to be on the Facebook platform's payroll, but it's a lot. And considering the platform as a whole has been much more adventurous with revenue strategies than Facebook itself has, I should certainly hope it's been raking in the cash for some time now.

So then there's the assertion brought up by AdAge's Michael Learmonth, that Facebook is pretty much sitting on a goldmine here. Which brings back the evil-robot thinking. Once again, Facebook is dealing with a massive and extremely diverse set of individuals and companies here. Social games manufacturer Zynga may be rolling in cash, but there are loads of other apps on the platform that don't make a cent. Has Facebook let the platform get too big and too amorphous for it to wrangle decent revenues out of it? ("I'm sorry, Mark. I'm afraid I can't do that.")

Which is why there are two things to watch here. One is the rollout of Verified Apps, which may have some unannounced or even under-the-table benefits that Facebook hasn't hinted at yet. Facebook's key terms for Verified Apps acceptance are "trustworthy" and "meaningful." But I wouldn't be at all surprised if "can make money, and can help us do so, too" is an unspoken criterion. Verified Apps will give Facebook the opportunity to work closely with a much more uniform and manageable set of developers and companies who have already shown a decent degree of loyalty to the social network.

Second, there's Facebook's finally-coming-soon (or is it?) Holy Grail of revenues, which is either a virtual currency system for developers or a PayPal-like transaction platform, or maybe a bit of both. The latest signs indicate that Facebook will be expanding the "credits" system it uses for its in-house Gifts application to select developers. Beyond that, it's not clear how it will expand.

With both a potential monetization strategy in place, and a policy (Verified Apps) to keep it from turning into a free-for-all that could start eating up cash rather than pulling it in, Facebook is all set. Or, if you prefer the hyped-up version, it almost has the arsenal in place to take on those evil robots.

Online app provider Zoho announced Tuesday that it has added single sign-on support for Zoho CRM, its on-demand customer relationship management app for organizations that run businesses online. According to the company, Zoho CRM users will be able to access all of Zoho's services and won't be prompted to re-authenticate when they switch between applications. Zoho CRM is the last of the company's applications to add single sign-on.

Mio.tv, a company that offers music videos and other entertainment clips for Latin Americans, announced Tuesday that it has acquired Spanish social network Wamba for approximately $5.1 million. According to the company, it acquired Wamba to extend its reach and influence in the Latin American community.

Online domain name marketplace Sedo acquired RevenueDirect, a domain parking service, the company announced Tuesday. According to Sedo's executives, it's trying to attain more market share in the U.S., and its acquisition of RevenueDirect is a key component in that strategy. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

myYearbook.com announced Tuesday that its "Causes" application and its users have removed more than 1 million pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere through donations. A portion of the funds received by myYearbook through its social network and applications was donated to charities like Carbonfund.org, which fights against global warming and climate change. So far, the company has donated over $250,000.

Last month, Twitter posted a job listing saying it was looking for someone who knew business, and now it looks like the microblogging site has found one--the first of several, it appears. Twitter has hired Kevin Thau, a veteran of tech companies Buzzwire and Openwave, as its director of mobile business development.

According to Twitter stats app Twitterholic, Thau has been using Twitter since early March of last year. He's been hired in part to handle the "crushing amount" of partnership proposals that Twitter receives. The mobile front is particularly important for Twitter, as it's the primary platform for many users. It's also been a contentious space, because it involves dealing with cell phone carriers around the world. Skyrocketing costs have forced Twitter to cut some of its international mobile numbers.

It's the first business development post that the San Francisco-based Twitter has filled. But it's currently also looking to hire a business product manager and a director of strategic partnerships. Twitter hasn't put forth a concrete business plan yet, but executives have hinted that business partnerships or corporate accounts may be part of the strategy.

It was only a matter of time. Social network Facebook says it has hit the milestone of 150 million active users, just more than two months after reaching 120 million and about four months after reaching 100 million. The site hit 140 million in the middle of December.

The announcement was made on the Facebook company blog by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Should Facebook sustain this rate of growth, the 5-year-old site could hit 200 million users before Zuckerberg reaches his 25th birthday this spring.

Nearly half of those 150 million members, Zuckerberg wrote, use Facebook every day. Most of the site's new members now come from outside the United States. "This includes people in every continent--even Antarctica," the post read. "If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia, and Nigeria."

But Facebook Nation wouldn't be a financial heavyweight just yet. The company has made it clear that right now, it's focusing on growth over revenues.

That can be precarious, especially during difficult financial times, when Facebook's deep-pocketed backers may find those pockets a bit shallower. As some critics have pointed out, server power and other infrastructure costs are not as cheap internationally as they are in the States.

Reaching a milestone like this is obviously a big victory for Zuckerberg and the rest of Facebook, and the company insists that it's in solid financial shape to handle this kind of growth. That said, it'll only escalate the speculation--did anyone really believe that gossip about Facebook would end along with 2008?

Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue. The San Francisco start-up, flush with venture funding and media hype, has yet to make a cent.

"As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business," the job description reads.

Gee! You don't say?

Twitter CEO Evan Williams has hinted that the future of Twitter lies in some sort of corporate accounts. And indeed, the job posting says the gig involves the creation of "products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications."

But it also asks for "strong familiarity with online advertising and marketing models," which means that Twitter advertisements may not be off the blocks.

There's a big Wall Street Journal piece on Tuesday about how MySpace is still seriously beating Facebook in the advertising and marketing game, regardless of the fact that Facebook has started to breeze past it in traffic.

This is one of those stories geared toward the Journal's less technical readers, undoubtedly, since most of the details are no surprise to social media junkies. But the take-home point is a good one: Big media ownership has been helpful to MySpace, whereas the independent Facebook is still learning the advertising game.

MySpace is owned by News Corp. (which also owns the Wall Street Journal) and hence has much deeper and more established connections to Madison Avenue. MySpace is also more heavily reliant on traditional display ads, whereas Facebook has chosen to take a more difficult route with "engagement ads," announced in August, and other forms of "social advertising." It's part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's continual mantra of "focus on innovation and the profits will come eventually."

But Facebook had some notable success recently with a Ben & Jerry's "engagement ad" on Election Day. The ice cream company sponsored an event RSVP that appeared on Facebook's home page, where members could respond "yes" or "no" to its Election Day offer of free ice cream for anyone who voted. RSVPs from friends would show up in members' news feeds, meaning more exposure for Ben & Jerry's. And if the snaking line I saw outside a Ben & Jerry's near NYU last Tuesday night was any indicator, the marketing effort worked.

In other words, this advertising race isn't over yet.

Maybe it's advice he heard from a career counselor at Harvard and took to heart: Do what you love, and the money will follow. For now, what Mark Zuckerberg wants most for Facebook is to see it grow and grow and grow some more, without too much fretting over the bottom line.

In an interview with a blogger for the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Facebook's co-founder and CEO minced no words on the matter: "Growth is primary, revenue is secondary."

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg at the D6 conference in May.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

Of course, it could be less a philosophical matter than a practical one for a site that's still sketching out its plans for making money to match its popularity. And bless his heart, even in a tanking global economy, Zuckerberg suggests there's plenty of time for that. He elaborates:

But what every great Internet company has done is to figure out a way to make money that has to match to what they are doing on the site. I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did. But on both sites people find information valuable. I'm pretty sure that we will find an analogous business model. But we are experimenting already. One group is very focused on targeting; another part is focused on social recommendation from your friends. In three years from now we have to figure out what the optimum model is.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said essentially the same thing over the summer--the social network's focus is on growth.

How do the two executives divvy up their responsibilities? Zuckerberg said of Sandberg, who joined Facebook about six months ago:

She is an excellent manager. She is very good in building our international organization. I'm focused on the direction of the company, especially of the product development, and the overall strategy. I spend a lot of time working with engineers and product developers. We work together hand in hand.

He also made it clear who's boss: "Me!"

On Friday, Zuckerberg will be taking part in a "fireside chat" at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

For the full interview, including Zuckerberg's take on Facebook's Windows Live Search deal, its international growth, and the possibility of an IPO, see " Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Our focus is growth, not revenue."