This probably shouldn't be surprising news but it has some shock value. Twitter is very close to what some would consider a model civic communications platform. I remember hearing one tech pundit refer to it as "citizen's band radio for the 21st century." The idea that such an effective tool needs to generate revenue a la Facebook seems odd, even though I understand that it operates like any other business entity.
I don't see why not. You can take the result of some effort and say, OK, this is a model for the kind of result we'd like, but are not currently getting from our more open, idealistic systems. There would probably be many benefits to such, err...open ways of thinking.
It's interesting how different people's opinions can be. 140 character limits, extreme prioritization of newest content and large scale bot participation are not what I'd look for in a "model civic communications platform", but conversely I can see its virtues from an advertiser perspective: the non-ad content is for the most part qualitatively indistinguishable from the ads and much of the user base actively wants to follow brands.
revenue yes; profits... and perhaps even gratuitously obscene profits... probably not. but people wouldn't have invested in a "cb radio" system years ago. Wikipedia feels the need to beg every so often - not sure people would want to see that in their twitter streams, but I'm not sure who's really happy about ads either.
