For Twitter Founder Evan Williams, Anything Could Happen

As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer—having been featured in an episode of CSI, on MTV, and in nearly every major newspaper—but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month), and there are no immediate plans for it to be anything otherwise. Although some technologists think Twitter could one day be a billion-dollar company, many others say it represents the worst of Web 2.0: a company that is built to flip, that does little of value and has no long-term prospects as a standalone enterprise. Williams and his collaborators don’t entirely dispute this notion. Co-founder Jack Dorsey, the service’s inventor, freely admits that Twitter is “useless, in a sense” and that many people are “violently turned off” by the idea of constant communications. But, he adds, “there’s a lot of value in seemingly useless things.”“

Inc