Not long. They finally announced their moneymaking debut: Promoted Tweets. About to enter its "free" beta phase, Promoted Tweets is expected to charge down the road. For now test sponsors like Virgin America, Sony, Starbucks and Best Buys will get tweet blasts for free.

Propped up by venture capitalists, Twitter has gone through four rounds of financing totaling $155 million. The last round, which dropped in September 2009 for a whopping $100 million, pooled cash from six major players, Morgan Stanley among them. Pros at making money, these high rollers are in it for the profits. So why would they go along on a ride of endless tweets and watch as Twitter spends its way into a money pit. The company isn't making a profit. So what's it to them?

Facebook, which announced they were cash flow positive in September 2009, even though it was valued at several billion as early as 2007, is a prime benchmark. Now the second most popular website on the net with an estimated count of 350 million users, Facebook has clout. When a company can deliver users, it has clout — even without profitability. When it can deliver details on user habits, without breaching its privacy policy, it has clout. When it can form synergistic alliances, it can tap its clout. And that's why Twitter may be Internet gold. Twitter has millions of users and it can deliver communities.

In February 2009 Twitter struck a deal with Bell Mobility in Canada to deliver more tweets over cell phones. While Twitter has been paying SMS (texting) fees for its Twitter users to keep the flow of tweets completely mobile, the deal with Bell Mobility, which involved a large volume of tweets, saw Twitter leveraging its community for some cash back or, as Twitter execs have hinted, revenue sharing.

In a deal that is reportedly worth about $25 million, Twitter has also negotiated search engine deals with Google and Bing for its huge volume of tweets.

Forging these kinds of alliances could be a piecemeal way for Twitter to see a profit, which could pale in comparison to the big sell-off, assuming there is one. With over 90 million registered users who've generated more than six billion tweets, and as the 13th most visited website in the U.S., it's got to be attractive to someone. But who? And when is the wedding? Three years and counting since its unveiling, Twitter doesn't want to give hackers more time to take it down or more competitors more incentive to best them.

If it wants to be more than a fad, something's gotta give. And it did with the advent of Promoted Tweets. Unprofitable YouTube definitely managed to lure its big suitor Google, who bit for $1.65 billion when it purchased the company.

On top of the potential windfall, there are probably all of those Twitter applications that have yet to be realized. We're still in our infancy in terms of cyber networking. Social experiments are underway. Consider the invented plight of Evan Ratliff, a writer Wired magazine ran a feature on when they told him to get lost. His mission was to make the geographical coordinates of his existence a nationwide contest. Wired would pay anyone who could locate him $5,000. He was to vanish for a month and reinvent himself. Armed with a laptop and some cash, he took off. Why the contest? It was a social experiment to see how people would share information to hunt him down. The cyber platform that emerged as the dominant tool in the manhunt: Twitter. Strangers formed groups and tweeted their brains out, sharing leads on Ratliff's whereabouts, his alleged disguises and his digital slip-ups.