Twitter Secures Venture Capital, Aims to Become a Utility

Spark Capital and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos led the round, the San Francisco company's third, with existing investors Union Square Ventures and Digital Garage participating. Spark Capital's Bijan Sabet, an active Tweeter, joins the board.

Twitter, whose motto is "What are you doing?", is not divulging financial details, but word in the blogosphere is that it landed $15 million for a valuation of slightly less than $100 million. That's a lot of dollars for these characters.

Twitter will use some of the windfall to become a bit more reliable. Never before have users been so upbeat about a service that goes down as often as Twitter. It has already begun to take some steps in that direction. (Wrote TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington: "They are the only service I know of where users rejoice when they simply manage to keep their service live.") The frequent service outages were causing some consternation.

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

I agree that Twitter is on track to become an indispensable service. In April I said"Twitter is becoming an Internet utility," and meant it. Twitter is still a relatively small service, but users are averaging at least 15 twitter messages per day, meaning they are highly engaged. If they can get the platform stable, I believe they will eventually become as ubiquitous as email, instant messaging, sms and other forms of communication.

As a "business user" of twitter, I have found it to be incredibly useful to me in my job, as the other people that are in my twitter network share my interests, views and passions. They have found me or I have found them and collectively, we contribute to our own zeitgeist, one that provides a look into what's hot and worth looking at in our space (the mobile industry, advertising, and technology trends).