By Denis Campbell

So are millions of others but founder and CEO Evan Williams said yesterday “The revenue’s coming soon, but I won’t tell you how” at a Churchill Club business event in San Francisco as he brushed aside criticism that the company is slow to generate revenue. That does seem to be a repetitive theme on the Web. Williams co-founded Blogger which he sold to Google so this was a not a charity benefit luncheon.

This company also has big backers. Jeff Bezos, amazon founder is their biggest fan and investor. While Williams sounded a bit lost at the start, “we will make money, I can’t say exactly how because… we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.” He repeatedly talked about generating fees from Twitter content and corporate users.

There seems to be a plan… talks with large consumer packaged good companies, looking at Q1 for revenues, plans aren’t just ads or sponsorships, want revenues to be product-based, Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well… the usual public doublespeak to tease and show how smart you are. 

Williams also said that the company is working on ways to make Twitter easier for newbies to get into. “It’s amazing anyone uses Twitter today,” he said. “It’s hard.” I’ll second that. Simple messages but do I really want to know that much about my “friends” and do they want to know that much about me? And this following thing seems like cyber-stalking unless managed. Yeah one does have to be careful who they let into their tent and the idea that millions of folks can just check in on my random thoughts is a bit, well, strange…

austingirl sent one of a dozen or so invites. I wasn’t sure what it was all about. I’d written somewhat derisively in an earlier column that telling people I have a life and shut off the computer every so often that, “I’m no longer at my computer because I’m taking a dump,” seemed to defeat the purpose of being unplugged, but hey, I want to be seen as tech savvy. 

I listened to an NPR interview about a business version of Twitter for companies to track projects internally and eliminating clogged e-mail boxes, making folks use 140 characters instead of 600 words seemed a good idea and one which, if they thought about, one could sell a global platform for internal Twitting and it could generate revenue and cut down on abuses because like e-mail, Big Brother could always be watching. 

austingirl assured me I’d become addicted. So I decided to give it the full treatment and played full on for a few days. I may have posted ten things the first day and could not in my life try to keep up with JackBastide who had just under 100 posts in 24 hours. Of course Jack has an audience of 7,144 people following his mostly witty stuff and I marvel at his resilience. 

I have 14 people following me and a bunch of folks I never heard of wanting to as requests fill the mailbox daily. I only ask why? It cannot be my witty reportage? So, I guess this is the new trading cards? We follow and live our lives vicariously through others? I get celebrity sightings, tinyurl.com links and other useful stuff and most of it happens so quickly my eyes glaze over. I cannot imagine them all coming to my cell phone as SMS messages or sending them that way.

I now Twitter once a day, although UK Progressive posts automatically Tweet to Twitter, awww come on now people I cannot even type that with a straight face.

My world, welcome to it or better yet, maybe not.