Twitter readies advertising platform as COO says no IP0 in 2010

Costolo said the microblogging service was focusing on building revenue and living up to its $1 billion valuation in 2010, having raised more than $155 million, and that an IPO was still a way off.

Its money-making plans include paid-for commercial accounts that CEO and founder Biz Stone talked about at the end of last year. These would offer corporate customers a variety of analytics tools to extract more data and value from their activity on Twitter.

The second area of revenue Costolo spoke about is its planned advertising platform, which would launch very soon.

He said that Twitter planned to do tests with the new advertising service ahead of a full rollout. Costolo reassured users that the new advertising will be discreet and "enhance the platform".

Speak to Bloomberg, Costolo, said: "We have markets we want to enter, a business we want to build, we've got expectations we need to live up to. We have to catch up to our valuation I mean there is no question about, we know we have to.

"One of the things we have talked about internally is that we gone out and we have raised all this money and created this global brand, one of the fastest if not the fastest growing brands in the history of the world. Now we have to go and build a business that lives up to that valuation."

Last week it was reported that Twitter was recruiting a number of staff whose main focus will be to generate cash for the microblogging service and work on cutting edge "monetisation projects".

Other revenue generating areas that Costolo referred to include more cutting more distribution deals such as the ones struck for Microsoft and Google to take its real-time feed last year. Costolo said he could see Twitter signing another ten of those.

International growth and acquisition will also feature on Twitter's radar in the coming year.

Costolo said: "We'll continue to look for areas where we think we need to be much more aggressive. We're not looking at 2010 as an OK, let's slow down year."

Yesterday, Twitter was down for almost an hour and a half and users were unable to access their accounts.

Twitter, in a post on its blog, said: "We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes.

"This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage."