When the earth shook in Los Angeles last week, the first reports didn't come from traditional media outlets, but from Twitter, the "micro-blogging" service where users can send short, instant status updates to their friends via e-mail and mobile phone. Ten minutes before the Associated Press reported news of the tremor, a Twitter user named Caroline (Vixy) posted a simple update: "Earthquake."

Blogs and news sites buzzed the next day about how Twitter had ushered in a new era of communication. Such proclamations would have most internet entrepreneurs seeing dollar signs. But not Biz Stone, who insists Twitter's mission is simply to provide a useful, robust service and let the dollars follow later.

"At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan," says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.

Stone's hesitance to "monetize" Twitter echoes that of other major Web 2.0 companies, such as Facebook and YouTube, whose founders have said they'd build their audience first and find revenue streams later. But those giants have shown that converting eyeballs into money hasn't exactly been easy; Facebook has yet to start generating meaningful profit, and Google has said on a number of occasions that it has yet to find the right business model for monetizing YouTube's considerable traffic. Twitter, despite some plans Stone has up his sleeve, may very well find itself in the same position.

Today Twitter makes a negligible amount of revenue from users that send and receive messages as SMS texts, and overall loses an undisclosed amount of money.

But Twitter's user base has undeniably skyrocketed. The service has grown to more than 2 million per month, ten times more than April 2007, according to Compete.com. As of March 2008, 200,000 active Twitter users per week sent 3 million updates per day, according to numbers obtained by TechCrunch.

Indeed, the service's growth has caught the company by surprise, and outages are not uncommon. On the heels of all this growth, Twitter announced a new round of funding in June, raising a reported $20 million in financing from V.C.'s Spark Capital and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos at a $100 million valuation.

But Stone is unconcerned about Twitter's current lack of profits or even revenues, saying too much focus on these things would be "a distraction" for Twitter. For one thing, the company is improving its infrastructure so the service doesn't keep getting overloaded.

"Unless we have a reliable service that works the way we think it should," Stone says, focusing on revenue "is really putting the cart before the horse."

Longer term, Stone, who previously worked on startups Xanga, Blogger.com, and Odeo, sees the company as a new paradigm for how people will find out about and respond to news in the future, with potential revenues to match. But one idea that Stone is considering simply capitalizes on the user behavior his network has helped to establish: real-time news.

"For over the last 200 years, you've seen big companies grow off the concept of real-time updates," he says. "If you look at media companies like Thomson Reuters or Bloomberg, or the stock exchange, people and businesses are dependent on real-time news coming in as it happens. Twitter is similar, except it's much broader than just one kind of news, like stock updates. So when you think of it that broadly as a utility, I think you can begin to imagine how big the potential is for Twitter as a commercial entity."

The most obvious solution to how Twitter can make money would be to serve advertising directly in a user's Twitter feed (or "timeline" as the company calls it), or elsewhere on the site. But Stone and his fellow execs are wary of alienating Twitter's hardcore user base, which has grown accustomed to an ad-free service.

"How would they respond to us putting ads on the site?" Stone says. "Are we going to end up pissing them off?"

Stone says the key to making advertising acceptable to the Twitter community is ensuring that users choose which commercial messages they are exposed to, a lesson Facebook failed to heed last year when it was forced to quickly abandon its disastrous Beacon marketing system. But as with other potential revenue models under consideration, Stone would not elaborate on how he'd use such an opt-in system on Twitter.

One of Twitter's most likely revenue streams is through advertisements in search results where messages could be tied to what users were searching on. Twitter recently purchased Summize, a search engine specifically designed to sift through Twitter messages, for a reported $15 million in cash and stock.

"There is a pretty obvious opportunity there," Stone says. "There is a level of intent that someone is showing when they come to a Twitter search and type in, say, 'iPhone.'"

Another possible revenue stream is corporations paying to use the service to stay in frequent contact with their customers. Several large companies, including Dell, Whole Foods, and JetBlue, have already set up corporate presences on Twitter to let customers know about special offers and even answer customer questions.

In Dell's case, the company says it's made "well over" $500,000 in sales from sending special offers from its Dell Outlet store to its Twitter group, which it began in June 2007. The group has almost 1,500 "followers" who receive its messages on a regular basis.

"This is where are our customers are going," says Bob Pearson, Dell's vice president for communities and conversations. "These folks are influencers, and they want to talk about the hottest or latest stuff going on."

Dell also answers individual user questions via its Twitter group, which is what companies like JetBlue (almost 3,500 followers) and Whole Foods (2,000-plus followers) primarily use Twitter for.

To a company like Dell, $500,000 is a relatively small amount, but it does hint at the potential windfall companies can reap from Twitter. "If you've got 1,000 people following you, something's happening," Pearson says. "The real potential is in the future when you've got 10,000 people following."

While Stone says charging corporate users for a Twitter presence is something he might consider doing, it's not at all clear that companies would be willing to pony up for it. When asked whether Dell would consider paying Twitter for, say, each user that signed up to receive its feed, Pearson says "probably not." Whole Foods and JetBlue both say it's too early to say whether they'd be willing to pay Twitter for its service.

"One of the beauties of Twitter is that anyone can go on, and it doesn't cost anything," says Pearson. "There are other ways that Twitter can monetize its site, through advertising or other means. They don't have to be charging business customers to be part of it. But that's for them to think through."