Stephen’s Posterous

VentureBeat reported that angel investing partners Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have finished raising money for supposed $300 million venture fund, nicknamed Project A, according to an article in BoomTown that cites "numerous sources close to the situation."

The fund will invest between $200,000 to $1 million in a company, with $500,000 as typical investment. These would most likely be young, web-focused companies.

Mr. Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape and build-your-own-social-network startup Ning, first announced the fund in an interview on the Charlie Rose Show.

In the interview on the Charlie Rose show, Mr. Andreessen said that “our claim to fame is, we’ve actually, you know, by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, we’ve done it, we’ve been on that side of the table for a long time; we know what it’s like.”

Mr. Andreessen’s angel investments include Facebook, Digg, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Other backers for the fund include institutional investors and other Silicon Valley luminaries.

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Wall Street Journal's Venture Capital Dispatch reported that Topsy Labs Inc. , launched Topsy.com, a new form of Internet search engine for Twitter and links on Twitter on May 27, 2009. The company is backed by almost $15 million in venture equity and debt.

TechCrunch said that Topsy is not strictly speaking a real time search engine. Topsy is just a search engine that has a new way of finding good results: Twitter users.

Here is what Topsy says about itself on its webpage:

Topsy is a new kind of search engine, with a new way of looking at the Internet. Topsy doesn't think the Internet is a collection of documents. Or even a web of documents. Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.

Topsy listens to the conversations taking place all the time on the living, social web. This is the rapidly growing, exciting world of Twitter, Blogs, Flickr, Digg, Yelp, Identica and many other communities. People use these communities to share reviews, opinions, messages, comments and discussions about things. Topsy indexes those things. Topsy indexes what people are talking about.

Tomio Geron of Venture Capital Dispatch writes:

Topsy provides search results on a topic based on the influence of the person who is writing the Tweet. That influence is measured by how many times people have "re-tweeted," or reposted, that person’s messages, as well as the number of people who "follow" or read the person’s posts. In other words, people who have their messages forwarded the most have the most influence. Topsy also aggregates links to outside Web pages from Twitter that have been garbled with URL shorteners that have become popular on Twitter.

Since web pages are not the only places where people are posting content or links, and web pages are not as quickly updated with conversations as Twitter is, Topsy provides a way to search for what is being discussed. The company is starting with Twitter but could eventually move into other online applications and communities.

Gary Iwatani, a co-founder of the company, told VentureWire:

We saw this shift going on and wanted to come up with a new paradigm for interpreting signals going on on the Internet. We wanted to tap into the original source of the signals, which were the authors of the citations themselves. So we developed a platform that can parse these signals from the entire social Web.

According to Venture Capital Dispatch, Topsy was seed-funded with $900,000 from angel investor Scott Banister in January 2008 and received $11 million in a second round in December 2008 led by Blue Run Ventures, along with Ignition Partners, Founders Fund, and Scott Banister. In March 2009, it raised $3 million in venture debt from Western Technology Investment.

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The concept behind StockTwits is simple--basically, if you tweet using a “$” symbol to indicate a stock, that message will be pulled into the StockTwits, making it an easy way to see what everyone’s saying about the market on Twitter.

What’s powerful here is that StockTwits is becoming a focused community within the messy, random cacophony you find on Twitter--and even better, a community that’s all about helping people make money. It’s also moving beyond the StockTwits site alone, with features like a Firefox browser plugin to enhance what you see within Twitter and integration with blogs built on the WordPress platform.

StockTwits remains free but a coming premium edition will be forthcoming.

Leaving Twitter by David Gelles, FT.com

The incessant media focus on Twitter, coupled with a parade of celebrity endorsers from Oprah to Lance has excited enormous public interest in the micro-blogging service. Eager to see what all the fuss is about, millions of people around the world are signing up to send their first "tweets". Unique users of Twitter grew by more than 100 per cent in March, and are now estimated at 14m.

But it turns out most of those users are determining that the fuss isn't about all that much, after all. A full 60 per cent of new Twitter users fail to tweet again the following month, according to David Martin, Nielsen vice-president of primary research.

Mr Martin makes the case that this strikingly low 40 per cent retention rate poses a significant obstacle to Twitter's long-term success. "A high retention rate doesn't guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite," he said. "There simply aren't enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point."

Comparing Twitter with Facebook and MySpace, Mr Martin notes that when today's two dominant social networks were emerging, their retention rates were twice as high. "When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 per cent today," he said.

As Facebook adapts its service to mimic many of the most popular features of Twitter, these numbers give good reason to think that Facebook, with its 200m users and robust retention rates, has little to fear from the flurry of interest in Twitter.

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Napster founder Shawn Fanning's newest brainshild by Alex Pham, LATimes.com

Mention the name Shawn Fanning, and most people still picture a kid in his dorm room at Northeastern University in Boston, cooking up Napster, a file-sharing website that let users trade songs for free and triggered a financial tsunami in the music industry.

Fanning, now 28 and living in San Francisco, is not only long out of college, but he's also moved on to his third company, Rupture. His second one, music licensing company Snocap, was sold in April 2008 to Imeem Inc., a social networking site. This third venture is related to one of Fanning's personal passions: games.

Pick any year between 2009 and 1989, when he played his first game, the Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo Entertainment System console, and Fanning will tick off a list of hot titles for that year. Most people mark their lives by major events; Fanning marks his by the releases of new games.

He started Rupture in 2006 to help gamers find out what their friends are playing and connect. He sold Rupture in June to video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. for $30 million. But Fanning remained at the San Francisco start-up to see his newest brainchild through to launch, which is expected this summer.

The Twitter Revolution by Michael S. Malone, WSJ.com

"Twitter is the side project that took," says company co-founder Biz Stone, 35. "Now it's our chance to do something transformative."

When I arrive at Twitter's headquarters on a recent morning, Jerry Brown is waiting in the lobby, just another day at the world's hottest high-tech company. "It's pretty bizarre," says co-founder Evan Williams, 37. "At least once per day we look at each and say, 'What the hell?' It's like we're living out the script of the ultimate start-up company story."

But other than the familiar face of California's attorney general standing near the steel front door, you would hardly know that this little company of about 30 employees is the epicenter of the Web, used by an estimated 20 million Americans on a daily, even minute-by-minute, basis. Just how fast Twitter is growing is a company secret, but its traffic appears to be more than doubling every month.

The company itself seems calm and casual. The employees drift in, grab some free food and eventually make their way to their desks. It's located in an anonymous warehouse just a couple blocks from South Park, the once-frenzied environs of the dot-com companies of the first Internet boom.

In his sports shirt and slacks, sipping a bottle of apple juice, Mr. Williams exhibits indifference to the trappings of success. So does Mr. Stone, who last year won an Oxford Union debate wearing a borrowed bow tie and a pair of black sneakers.

The company is hiring like crazy, it expects to double its size in the next month or two, and is also adding a senior management, notably new vice-president of global operations Santosh Jayaram, hired away from Google. "We've never had a company that grew past 15 to 20 people," says Mr. Stone, "We're kind of excited about that."

Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture. President Barack Obama twittered the words, "We just made history," on the night of his election. It was a twittered image that first captured the forced landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.

Scores of people trapped in the Mumbai terrorist attack twittered desperately for help. And in a much discussed event, a San Francisco technology writer twittered his surprise to discover his home was being broken into.

Strictly speaking, Twitter is a social networking application that enables users to post short text messages,  called tweets, of no more than 140 characters on their personal feed. These real-time diary entries can then be read by other users, called "followers," who have subscribed to that page.

Twitter is much more than a novel way to share updates of one's daily life with friends. It's now evolved into a powerful new marketing and communications tool. Regional emergency preparedness organizations are looking at Twitter as a way to reach millions of people during a disaster.

NASA is using it to regularly update interested parties about the status of space shuttle flights. And one journalist solicited help from fellow Twitterers to get himself out of an Egyptian jail. It worked.

The real Twitter revolution may prove to be much more everyday. When I stop for a latte at Peet's Coffee on the way to the interview, the manager tells me that he plans to start sending out tweets to let regular customers know when a table is open. He isn't alone.

A Manhattan bakery twitters when warm cookies come out of the oven. "It's those small stories that really inspire us," says Mr. Stone. "Those are the things that transform people's lives."

Mr. Stone vividly remembers the first time he appreciated the power of Twitter. He and his now-wife had just bought a house in Berkeley and, having spent the day scraping up carpet and painting walls, he was tired and sweaty. "That's when I got a twitter from Evan saying, 'Up in Sonoma drinking pinot noir after a massage.' I just started laughing. That's when I realized that this technology could be entertaining too," as opposed to a basic communications tool, he says.

"It took us a while to figure out that it really was a big deal," says Mr. Williams. It was at the annual South by Southwest tech conference/music festival in Austin, Texas, in March 2008, that the social power of Twitter came home to the co-founders. "I found myself watching groups of people twittering each other to coordinate their actions, which bar to go to, which speech to attend, and it was like seeing a flock of birds in motion," says Mr. Stone.

As with many Web entrepreneurs, Messrs. Williams and Stone took unconventional paths to success.

Mr. Williams was born on a soybean, corn and cattle farm near Clarks, Neb., pop. 361, where he attended the single public school there. In a class of just 14, he took part in everything from sports to band. "In a school that small, everyone does it all," he says.

But he was an indifferent student and felt like a black sheep at home, too. His father and brother loved to farm and hunt, while Evan, a vegetarian, preferred to read and ponder schemes for building enterprises.

Eventually he made it to the University of Nebraska, but he never declared a major, took as few classes as possible, and eventually dropped out. In the years that followed, Mr. Williams drifted around the country, Key West, Dallas, Austin, working various technology jobs and trying to pursue start-ups.

But every time he got started on one idea, some new idea would pop into his head, luring him away and preventing him from ever following through on a project. "It was turning into a constant pattern," Mr. Williams recalls.

By 1996, Mr. Williams found himself back on the family farm, with little money and few prospects. "I was in the dumps," he recalls. He had long worshipped California's Silicon Valley from afar, and now, with nothing to lose, he decided to move there. "Unfortunately, my aim was a little off," he says, since he landed in the farming town of Sebastopol in Marin County, working for the old-guard media/conference firm O'Reilly Inc.

In the end, that proved fortuitous. What began as a marketing job ended up as an independent contractor job writing computer code, and in short order, Mr. Williams parlayed that into freelance work with legendary Valley companies like Intel and Hewlett-Packard. "For the first time, I learned what it was like to work in an office and have a normal career. To be in real meetings. I also learned that I didn't want to do that."

Did Mr. Williams ever feel that there was something wrong with his inability to hold a traditional job? "No," he says. "I always figured there was something wrong with everybody else."

In 1999, Mr. Williams teamed up with another contractor, Meg Hourihan, and founded Pyra Labs to make management software. A much admired product which allowed managers to handle complex projects online, Pyra earned him a reputation as a brilliant entrepreneur who didn't know how to make money.

"The truth is," Mr. Williams protests, "we had revenues from the first day . . . there just wasn't enough of them." It should have ended in yet another business failure -- but in computer parlance, Mr. Williams decided to 'turn a bug into a feature.' This meant taking one of his distracting brainstorms and turning it into a company.

The new company, called Blogger.com -- Mr. Williams invented the term -- which was developed from a note-taking application on Pyra, was the original blog prototype. It proved to be one of the few successes of the era. Better yet, Mr. Williams even managed to nail down some real venture investment just as the bubble burst.

Mr. Williams finally had a real company and real money. Now he needed a team.

Enter Christopher Isaac "Biz" Stone. Raised in Wellesley, Mass., Mr. Stone had an early love for graphic arts and theater. But at the University of Massachusetts, he too had proven to be a distracted student, and when a job at publisher Little, Brown evolved from moving boxes to designing book covers, Mr. Stone dropped out of college.

In the years that followed, he, like Mr. Williams, discovered a natural gift for Web design and programming. In fact, the two young men had admired each other's work from opposite coasts.

So when Evan invited Biz to join Blogger, Biz moved West. He arrived just in time to get the news that Google decided to acquire Blogger. Messrs. Williams and Mr. Stone, neither of whom technically qualified for the CV-obsessed company, were suddenly Google employees.

The gig lasted 20 months and both men say they thoroughly enjoyed it. Mr. Williams even met his future wife at the firm. But the entrepreneurship gene couldn't be denied forever. And in 2005, both men decided to strike out on their own. "It was about the toughest decision I ever made," recalls Mr. Stone, "and if I'd known how high Google stock would go, I'm not sure I would have made it."

Once out of Google, Mr. Williams teamed with another entrepreneur, Noah Glass, to found Odeo, a podcasting company. It was a brilliant plan, until Apple decided to offer its own podcasting application in iTunes. Says Biz, who had also joined the firm, "I remember asking Evan, 'Do you really want to be the King of Podcasting?' And he said, 'No.' And that was it." Looking back, Mr. Williams says, "I didn't follow my gut. I intellectualized myself into Odeo."

Mr. Williams had taken venture capital money to build Odeo and to change its business model, and he had to buy out those investors with a big chunk of his Blogger cash. Once again abandoning the main idea for a sidelight, he transformed Odeo into Twitter by stripping down and selling off the podcasting component and keeping the social-networking tool, the last a concept proposed by Jack Dorsey, now Twitter chairman.

Under the guise of a fun communications tool, Twitter is building one of the world's most valuable real-time information caches. And as Twitter's profile continues to explode, Oprah just sent her first tweet on yesterday's show, many wonder whether the company will ever find a revenue model.

Others speculate about who will buy the young company. Google seems to be the leading candidate. "We know there are a lot of people looking at Twitter right now," says Mr. Stone.

For now, Messrs. Williams and Stone are keeping their plans secret. With patient investors who just put in $35 million in third-round funding, the company is in no hurry. Mr. Stone will only say that "we are enamored with the idea of going all the way." Adds Mr. Williams: "We want to have as large an impact as possible."

Mr. Williams says that the amount of money it would take to buy Twitter right now is more than any company could justify to its shareholders, but suggests three other possible scenarios.

First, that Twitter could go public, probably without him, as he has little interest in running a public company. Second, Twitter could remain private and somehow buy out its investors. Or third, they discover some other option no one has thought of yet.

Of course, there's still one more possibility: Yet another one of Mr. Williams's obsessive distractions, as he calls them. Lately, he's been pondering a way to revolutionize email.

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What’s the big deal with Twitter? The online instant update service has become a media sensation and a supposed target for the likes of Google and Facebook. But is it an over-hyped flash in the pan or a real business opportunity? The answer could be a bit of each.

Twitter lets people or organisations send messages to “followers”, fans, clients, employees or anyone who signs up. The updates, thoughts or reactions arrive instantly via cell phone or computer updates. They’re limited to 140 characters each, so pithiness is vital. All but one of the sentences in this article qualify.

Twitter’s 8m users run the gamut from lovelorn teenagers to celebrities like Britney Spears to the New York Times. The last of these has more than 500,000 followers receiving its story links and news updates. Some members of the US Congress use Twitter to fill in their constituents.

A few have even been spotted tapping away on their mobile phones in the middle of President Barack Obama’s speeches. The celebrity presence has drawn millions of users and driven media attention, but it can seem pretty inane. British actor Stephen Fry has 382,000 followers tracking updates of his peculiar daily minutiae. One example: “Me in a sarong. The freedom and ease ... Mmmm could get to like x”.

But scratch the surface, and Twitter does have potentially significant features. For a start, it’s a burgeoning social networking site. That means its membership or followership is both growing and sticky. It benefits from a network effect as more of people’s friends and colleagues sign up, their own incentive to join increases. Then it’s just a question of finding a way to make money from the traffic.

That may have eluded Twitter itself so far, but it could be what makes it interesting for potential acquirers. One key concept is real-time search, potentially a real technological advance. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines work, generally speaking, with old material. A search of Twitter could be made to yield almost real-time information on news, events and users’ opinions.

A search could track reactions to a just-released G20 communiqué, or employees’ instant responses to a company announcement. Twitter could also theoretically be used to analyse trends, almost to create real-time opinion polls.

Twitter also has one other thing few companies except Google have achieved so quickly. It has become a verb. Twittering, the sending of “tweets”, has become second nature to its users. There’s already a “twitiquette” for using the service, and some people are trying their hand at “twiterature”, also known as “twitlit”.

That could all help explain why Google might consider paying more than $250m for Twitter, as technology blog Techcrunch suggested last week. A few months ago, news reports also suggested Facebook was interested. Either company could conceivably harness Twitter for profit by selling custom advertising based on a user’s current activities or location, for instance.

For now, though, Twitter is nothing but potential from a business perspective. The website’s unique visitors for February 2009 were up nearly fifteen-fold from a year earlier. But the service has only just started trying to bring in revenues, let alone earn money. Meanwhile, its investors have sunk $57m into the company, including a $35m injection which valued it at $250m just two months ago.

So Twitter seems poised right on the line between Silicon Valley pipe-dream and the Next Big Thing. Its fame isn’t yet accompanied by any level of financial success. And its big weakness is that, in theory, another group of Stanford engineers could easily make a competing or better service.

But its story thus far does eerily echo that of another Silicon Valley hotshot: Google. And that may be the most important reason why Twitter’s hype, while excessive, is worth…well, following.

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On the Internet, we are faced with the extreme choice of pretending to be a rock star on sites like MySpace, or building a single personality that suits all our audiences on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

This is one of the paradoxes of the Internet age: the freedom of the Internet is also constraining. The image we project of ourselves online, what some academics call "unitary identity," becomes our defining image for all audiences. It does not allow us to shed a past identity or recreate ourselves, or to project different images to different audiences.

MySpace was founded partly as a reaction against the constraints of unitary identity on a hot Web site called Friendster. It was 2003, and Friendster had improved on the concept of building individual Web pages by allowing people to link their Web pages to those of their friends.

In the language of sociology, Friendster's innovation led to better online "signaling." The relationship between the signals we send about ourselves and our true selves are the topic of a social science called "signaling theory."

"Most of the qualities we're interested in about other people, Is this person nice? Trustworthy? Can she do this job? Can he be relied on in an emergency? Would she be a good parent? are not directly observable. Instead we rely on signals, which are more or less reliably correlated with underlying quality," Judith Donath and Danah Boyd wrote in BT Technology Journal in 2004.

Friendster allowed people to factor in a person's friends as part of the signal, leading to fuller and better signals. However, Friendster made a big mistake: It discouraged members from pretending to be someone they weren't. That meant no "Fakesters," people pretending to be Homer Simpson or God or Harvard University or a dog. It also meant no "Fraudsters," people pretending to be someone else, such as Britney Spears or their cousin Billy.

"The whole point of Friendster is that you're connected to somebody through mutual friends, not by virtue of the fact that you both like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups," Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams told the San Francisco Weekly at the time.

The "No Fakester" approach violated one of the Internet's central tenets, anonymity, best embodied by a Peter Steiner cartoon in the New Yorker from 1993 showing a dog in front of a computer screen with the caption, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

To many, the power of anonymity is not a luxury but a necessity, the essence of freedom. By gathering online anonymously, people are free to find others who share their political views or their sexual orientation without fear of repercussion.

As a result, many of Friendster's users revolted. They decried the "Fakester Genocide" on Facebook and vowed to start a "Fakester Revolution." They wrote a revolutionary document, the "Fakester Manifesto."

The first declaration:

"Identity is provisional. Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need. No other person or organization can abridge that right, as shape-shifting is inherent to human consciousness, and allows us to thrive and survive under greatly differing circumstances by becoming different people as need or desire arises. By assuming the mantle of the Other, it allows us, paradoxically, to complete ourselves. Every day is Halloween."

In the Fakester revolution, the founders of MySpace saw an opportunity. Founded in 2004, MySpace copied the basic features of Friendster, but welcomed Fakesters and allowed users to customize their pages with wallpaper and colorful layouts.

MySpace did not even seek to verify the email addresses of people who registered on the site-a standard practice on the Internet. MySpace imagined itself as an interactive replacement for MTV, a place where everyone could be a rock star.

"People kept telling us, 'You have to have a closed network,'" MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson later recalled in an interview with Fortune magazine. "'People will want to talk only to friends they already know.' We just didn't believe it. We never wanted to limit people from talking to each other."

As a result, the process of "friending" on MySpace took on a different tone than on Friendster. On Friendster, because people used their real identities, they tended to friend people they knew in real life. On MySpace, where fake identities flourished, friending did not imply that the two people knew each other.

Venture capitalist Jeremy Liew describes MySpace as a game where the winner is the one with the most friends. Like most videogames, he says, MySpace also has levels. Novices start with a rudimentary profile. Then they realize they have to take actions such as requesting friends or leaving comments on others' pages to get to the next level.

"People are competing," Mr. Liew said. "They're trying to win and doing things to try to make them win."

Rock bands, pinup girls such as Tila Tequila, and comedians such as Dane Cook all competed to gain the largest number of friends on MySpace, propelling its popularity. In 2005, News Corp. noticed the success of the fledgling Web site MySpace, and snapped it up. 

MySpace is now the most popular social network in the United States, with 70 million unique visitors in February 2009, according to comScore Media Metrix.

As MySpace has grown, so have its problems. Every day brings another story of a sexual predator, cyber-bully or others with bad intentions donning the mask of anonymity to ill-effect on MySpace. A Web site called MyCrimeSpace.com, which has no ties to MySpace, keeps a daily count of criminal activity linked to the Web site. Its tagline: "A Place for Fiends" is a play on MySpace's tagline "A Place for Friends."

In February 2006, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal launched an investigation of MySpace. He eventually gathered a coalition of attorneys general from 50 states who demanded that MySpace adopt technology to verify the ages of MySpace members and ensure that children younger than 13 do not join the site.

Mr. Blumenthal and other lawmakers argued that verifying identities would prevent sex offenders from harassing children and bullies from picking on other children online. In essence, they wanted people to send clearer signals about themselves online.

MySpace countered the complaints about safety by adding additional privacy features for younger users. It also argued that it was not responsible for the actions of users on its site. After all, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 grants Internet providers immunity from liability for third-party content.

In February 2007, MySpace won an important court victory when a Texas court dismissed a lawsuit by the mother of a 14-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by a 19-year-old she met on MySpace. The widely publicized lawsuit charged MySpace with negligence and fraud for failing to take reasonable safety measures to keep young children off its site. But U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks ruled: "If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace."

Anonymity also has received constitutional protection in the past. "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority in a 1995 opinion, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission. But he acknowledged, "The right to remain anonymous may be abused when it shields fraudulent conduct.

But political speech by its nature will sometimes have unpalatable consequences, and, in general, our society accords greater weight to the value of free speech than to the dangers of its misuse."

Even so, identity verification is enjoying a renaissance on Facebook, which has returned to the closed Friendster model of requiring people to use real identities. The popularity of Facebook, which has eclipsed MySpace's audience world-wide in terms of unique monthly visitors, shows that people are willing to trade in their privacy for the privileges of joining a community based on trust.

\People often disclose their real email addresses and phone numbers on Facebook, since their profile information is automatically restricted to their approved list of friends. The advantage of this kind of network based on offline connections is that it is harder for sexual predators and others with bad intentions to penetrate.

Facebook improved on Friendster's model dramatically in November 2006, when it launched the News Feed-a feature that provided members with updates about their friends' activities on Facebook. For instance, if a Facebook member added new photos to his or her profile page, friends would be notified in a news item on their own profile pages.

This seemingly simple innovation was, in fact, technically quite difficult. It has also proven to be a powerful signaling mechanism. Facebook members use the "status update" feature to signal everything from their emotions to location.

Inevitably, in 2006, a new service started,Twitter, that distilled the status update into a standalone service. Unlike Facebook, however, Twitter has returned to the MySpace model of allowing people to assume any identity they like. Last month, Facebook had 275.6 million unique visitors world-wide, MySpace had 123.5 million, and Twitter had 9.8 million, according to comScore Media Metrix.

The problem is that all these sites, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, constrain us to sending one "signal" to many audiences. Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski has written about the need to send different signals at different times.

That said, for job-seekers who don't want their bosses to know they are looking for work, Mr. Piskorski argued, mingling their signals with non-job seekers is effective. "By pooling themselves with actors who are using online networks to utilize their social capital better, the employed job seekers can be on the market, while claiming that they are not," he wrote.

What we need are better controls over which signals we are sending to our various online audiences. In its controversial redesign this month, Facebook has taken a step in that direction by highlighting "friend lists" that allow members to control which of their friends' updates they would like to view.

But Facebook has not taken the next step of allowing members to send different updates to different groups of friends. For example, I would like the option of sending a cheery update about the start of an out-of-town conference to colleagues, while griping to my friends about having to spend time away from my family.

Apparently, I'm not alone: Twitter says the ability to segment tweets for different audiences is its top-requested feature, but it hasn't had a chance to build it yet.

It seems MySpace was right to dream of allowing everyone the freedom to tap their inner rock star. But that now looks like a teenager's dream. As we've all grown up now, we want our multiple digital identities to more closely mirror our contradictory selves.

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In the three years since its launch, the messaging service Twitter has attracted millions of users, but its fast growth hasn't translated into significant revenue.

Now, other companies are trying to profit from Twitter's popularity by experimenting with business models that incorporate parts of the free messaging service. Twitter allows users to broadcast 140-character messages, known as "tweets," that other users can subscribe to, or "follow." Users can read the messages on Web sites, through custom Twitter-reading software and on their mobile phones.

The service's users run the gamut from publicity-seeking celebrities to moms who want to stay abreast of their children's schedules. Some enterprising users have even found ways to earn money by tweeting product endorsements. More recently, businesses have gotten into the act, brokering ads to appear alongside tweets filtered by topic, such as the Academy Awards, or helping brands promote themselves on Twitter.

German start-up Magpie & Friends has started paying users for the right to sell ads in their tweets. The company uses an auction system in which potential advertisers bid on keywords they want to associate with their ads like iPhone or NCAA.

Magpie looks for tweets about these topics among Twitter users who have signed up with it and, with permission, sends the winning bidders' ads into those users' message streams, to be seen by their followers. Advertisers typically pay from a few cents to around $13 per ad, and Magpie splits the proceeds with the user.

So far, none of the companies piggybacking on Twitter has reaped a windfall, but their strategies suggest some ways that Twitter, which was valued at $255 million in connection with a recent round of venture funding, according to people familiar with the matter, might go about cashing in on its growing ranks of users.

But in pursuit of revenue, Twitter faces the same challenge that has dogged social-networking platforms like Facebook. If advertisers can tap into its network free of charge, why would they pay the company to do so?

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn't view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says. Mr. Stone says Twitter recently hired a product manager to oversee the development of commercial accounts. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee, but Mr. Stone says Twitter hasn't set a launch date for them.

Twitter will get a cut of one outside business that sprang up this week, a Web site called ExecTweets. The site, launched by online advertising network Federated Media, displays tweets from business executives.

Microsoft Corp. is the sole sponsor the site, which touts the software maker's role with a "Brought to You by Microsoft" label. Federated plans to share some of the sponsorship revenue with Twitter, according to both companies. Federated says it plans to work with brand advertisers on other Twitter-related sites.

Others are trying to extract revenue from Twitter on their own. This month, Glam Media, an online-ad network and lifestyle Web site, plans to announce a new site and service that will filter and package tweets according to their themes. It intends to sell ads on these theme pages and to the share revenue with other Web sites that make its packages available on their sites, says Glam Chief Executive Samir Arora.

Glam tested the service during the Academy Awards in February. In the test, skin-care brand Aveeno, which is owned by Johnson & Johnson, sponsored a widget, or small software application, on Glam's Web site that highlighted tweets about the Oscars. Among the tweets from users: "I want to know how all those actresses stay so skinny."

Glam's Mr. Arora says the model is a new way to use news and events to make money online. "Live events have moved to the Web, but you need packaging of the content," he says. To give its packages more polish, Glam will combine the Twitter messages with other media like video.

Mashable, a blog that covers online social media, recently began soliciting brands to pay to have their tweets featured on its Web site, alongside other banner ads. JetBlue and MailChimp, which manages email marketing campaigns, signed up for the sponsorships; Mashable Chief Executive Pete Cashmore declines to disclose the price they paid. "It's kind of ironic that we're monetizing Twitter before Twitter," he says.

As Twitter's growth explodes, speculation has intensified about whether the service can be profitable. Twitter's online traffic, excluding cellphones, surged to nearly 9.8 million unique visitors in February from 6.1 million in January, according to comScore.

Fred Wilson, a Twitter investor and board member who is a partner at Union Square Ventures, says Twitter will make money by "following the money," or building on the ways that others are developing businesses based on the service.

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