Twitter COO Dick Costolo, speaking today on a panel at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp event in San Francisco, shed some light into the micromessaging service’s revenue plans, promising that it will begin taking a cut of its partners’ advertising revenues “early next year.” Meanwhile, it will “foster mechanisms that allow partners to do more sophisticated things” with its APIs. Twitter also plans to offer commercial accounts that contain premium features like analytics dashboards and multiple authors, according to Costolo.

Achieving the seemingly impossible task of building up more hype about Twitter’s business model, Costolo promised Twitter’s advertising will be “fascinating,” “non-traditional” and “really cool.” Some partners already pay Twitter to use certain parts of its APIs, he added, though Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur noted from the audience that his company does not.

Costolo emphasized that Twitter will continue to offer free access to users and partners, and that small startups who start building on Twitter’s APIs won’t be expected to pay up front.

In my first week back on the web beat at GigaOM, one of the topics I wanted to focus on was location. Let’s just say that hasn’t exactly been a difficult task. Coming at us from Boulder, San Francisco and London, here are today’s top three geo-tagging developments:

SimpleGeo launched today, promising to build a contextual infrastructure of points and eventually polygons for the world so that people can build apps that incorporate where users are located. The company says it’s already received 600 beta inquiries in its first day out, and it also received both audience and judges’ choice accolades at the Under the Radar event where it debuted.

“We’re selling shovels at the beginning of a gold rush,” is how co-founder Matt Galligan put it on a call today. “You want to add location, just come to us — it’s done.” Though four-person SimpleGeo still measures its age in months, it already has a price sheet: free, $399/month for small businesses and $2,499/month for custom implementations. Galligan said he expects to announce a funding round soon. (BTW, this follows the launch of competitor PublicEarth, which calls itself “the wiki for places,” yesterday.)

While Boulder, Colo.-based SimpleGeo may have moved quickly in its short life, big social sites aren’t necessarily waiting for little startups to come fill their location-based needs. Today Twitter launched a geotagging API, at first only available as an opt-in feature for outside apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. When used, this feature associates a tweeter’s exact location (as best as it can be determined) at the time of tweeting with the tweet itslf.

And lastly, Ambient Industries debuted a social location app for the iPhone today called Flook. While there’s no lack of competition for fun iPhone apps that enable users to mark up the world, Flook is built to be quirky, easy to browse and contextual-ad ready. The basic interface consists of virtual geo-tagged “cards” with facts, photos and recommendations left at particular locations by Flook users. Users can swipe through cards and turn them over to leave comments in a jaunty orange and purple interface manned by cute little robots (see video demo above).

What’s interesting is that Flook comes from two Symbian founders, Roger Nolan and Jane Sales. Said Nolan on a call from London today, “Apple seemed to just do all the things that Symbian and Nokia should have done for a long time.” So he and Sales (they’re married) along with two other co-founders raised $1 million 1 million pounds ($1.65 million) from Eden Ventures and Amadeus Capital and founded Ambient a year ago. Flook is the company’s first project.

Microsoft today at its developer conference in Los Angeles unveiled its Pinpoint service, which looks kind of like an app store aimed at enterprise developers and customers using Microsoft’s Azure cloud offerings, albeit one that goes beyond mere apps. It also showed off  a data repository, code-named Dallas, that offers developers access to a wide variety of public and fee-based data sets with which they can build useful programs. Dallas, which can be found in the Pinpoint market, strongly resembles the service shown off this year at DEMO from Austin, Texas-based Infochimps. It was also by far the most interesting element of Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s opening keynote, which highlighted what he called Redmond’s “three screens and cloud” view of the world.

If the remainder of the conference’s speaker line-up is any indication, Microsoft is embracing a world of apps and mashups to enable developers to build software that can run across mobile, PC and other device platforms. Linking all this together will be Microsoft’s Azure cloud, which will go into production Jan. 1, 2010. For more on Azure, check out our previous coverage. With Pinpoint, Microsoft is acknowledging the success of the Android Marketplace and Apple’s App Store, and trying to get developers excited about the prospect of building programs to run in Windows environments. Pinpoint also offers links to consulting services and companies that work with Microsoft.

The Dallas data store is a pretty compelling showcase “application” in the Pinpoint market, as developers could access any manner of data and build an application around it. For example, one could build an Urban Spoon-style application that uses a bunch of the available data sets to offer up evening entertainment options in the user’s local area. As Ozzie said after he emphasized all of the data now available to us in the form of government information, news, sensor networks and even web analytics, “Data does no good unless we turn it from the potential into the kinetic.”

With Dallas and Pinpoint Microsoft wants to become a company that aggregates, stores and serves up information in ways that are accessible to developers and corporate clients. On the consumer front, Microsoft has created agreements with companies like Wolfram Alpha, Facebook and Twitter for its Bing search engine as another way to surface data beyond the mere words listed on a web page. Microsoft isn’t just selling software anymore; it’s selling itself as a clearinghouse for information.

Among the other developments that have come out of the conference so far:

• Seesmic, the popular Twitter client, is building a Windows client that uses Silverlight.
• Matt Mullenweg Mullenwag, CEO of Automattic (Disclaimer: Automattic, maker of WordPress, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True), appeared onstage to say WordPress will offer access to Microsoft Azure for blogs to help handle spikes in traffic.
• Azure nerds will appreciate that Microsoft will support Java, PHP, MySQL, and Eclipse in addition to .Net.
• Those concerned about storing information on Microsoft’s servers after the T-Mobile Sidekick disaster should be relieved to hear that all items stored in Azure will be replicated in two data centers in each geographic region (in case a problem in one data center takes out the information there).
• The Cheezburger Network has launched a new site called Oddly Specific that showcases funny signs and uses the WordPress for Azure platform.

Om and Frank Eliason of Comcast

Om and I met Wednesday night with Frank Eliason of Comcast, better known as the person behind @comcastcares. Eliason is a genuinely cool guy who started out as the person solely responsible for handling Comcast complaints on Twitter, and who now has a staff of 10. Each day, he and his staff look over some 10,000 blog posts, handle countless tweets — and then seek to do something about any problems.

Since he’s such a Twitter power user, I asked him what his favorite applications for the micromessaging site were. He said the original Twitter web site is his favorite, but he’s also a fan of Simply Tweet on his iPhone because he likes the push notifications. PeopleBrowsr, an app that helps businesses mine information from Twitter, is another one he uses heavily. As for CoTweet, which is in the news right now for charging businesses $1,500 a month to find information on the service, he said he wasn’t initially a fan, but that ever since the company has modified the application to keep track of conversations between two users over time, he’s been turning to it more frequently. The ubiquitous TweetDeck isn’t something Eliason uses, but he says some of his staff love it.

Our conversation was brief as he had to rush off to meet some of his Comcast customers (he notified them of his presence in San Francisco via Twitter) — a reminder that while online interactions are a nice way to initiate relationships, face-to-face meetings are still necessary to cement them.

A pair of slices from a massive scrape of Twitter’s API could be of great use to programmers and researchers alike — as long as users don’t mind. The company behind the mining effort, Infochimps, is trying to demonstrate and promote its data aggregation service while offering up some useful information to interested parties.

At the end of last year, Infochimps posted a heftier version of its scrape of Twitter, which was taken down at the behest of the micro-messaging site over user privacy concerns. By releasing curated, anonymized chunks of data, the company may avoid most of the user privacy concerns that arose last time around. Then again, it may not.

One of the sets, a “token count,” adds up the number of particular tokens (individual hashtags, smileys and URLs) that have been tweeted since March 2006. The other links the ID strings between Twitter’s Search API and the standard Twitter API. The two APIs issue different ID numbers to users, which makes it annoying, if not impossible, for developers to link data across both services to one user.

Infochimps says it hopes “to send a signal that this data is valuable and useful to real-time search engines, Twitter apps, and social media researchers.” It also hopes to “start a conversation about where value really lies in this type of data, [and] the various ownership and privacy issues that arise.” Given the complaints from Twitter the first time data was posted, it’s a smart move on the part of Infochimps to add this disclosure and thoroughly anonymize the data. The company very much wants to avoid any sort of ill will or backlash from the Twitterati over the release of the data sets. Back in 2006, AOL Research released 20 million search keywords attached to user IDs for researchers to use. A number of individuals were identified as a result of the “anonymized” data, leading to a number of concerns over what sorts of data are kosher to be released.

Ownership and privacy aside, Infochimps is offering the “tokens” data set broken out by month for free, and $9,500 for a version broken out by hour. The “ID/API mapping” data set is being offered for $6,000.

Twitter, the San Francisco-based micro-messaging startup, recently raised about $98 million dollars from T. Rowe Price, Insight Venture Partners, Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners, valuing the company at a whopping $1.1 billion. NeXt Up Research, the firm founded by veteran financial analyst Michael Moe, disagrees with that post-money valuation, and instead values Twitter at about $526-$674 million. NeXt Up’s research report is offered to users of SharesPost, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based private online exchange that allows the sale of shares of private companies to willing buyers. Most of their concern is coming from the lack of revenues and worries that any diversification into money-making services could alienate the Twitter user base. According to the report, Twitter has over 70 million users.

The company‘s revenue model has yet to be tested. We believe that most revenue generation options available to the company have the potential to alienate at least some of Twitter‘s user base. Twitter may not have adequate time to revise its models before it loses its critical mass and reputation. Our estimated valuation of $526M – $674M is below the recent preferred funding round at a $1.1B valuation. However, we note that the preferred shares benefit from liquidation preference that limit the downside. We expect common share valuation to be driven by the company‘s revenue growth and profitability potential over the next 3 – 5 years.

They are estimating that Twitter will make between $114 million and $134 million in 2013 and between $126 million and $148 million in 2014. I bet these numbers don’t take into account the gobs of money Twitter is going to be making by licensing its data to both Microsoft and Google. No one really knows how much the two giants are ponying up for the Twitter fire hose.

Nevertheless, the report points out that Twitter has a special appeal for marketers. Twitter can share in the revenues generated by big brands.

We estimate that Twitter‘s opt-in feature allows for one of the most cost effective approaches for direct marketers. The cost of an effective message through Twitter, in our estimate, is likely to be (depending on how Twitter chooses to price it) less than $0.50, far lower than other approaches such as telemarketing or direct mail, which can cost an order of magnitude more.

For instance, Dell has indicated that it generated $3M in revenues from June 2007 to June 2009, of which $1M were in the last six months. The followers of Dell (who have opted in to receive messages) soared from 11k in December 2008 to 1.3 million in October 2009. We believe there are hundreds of businesses which have the potential to generate over $1M in revenues, allowing Twitter to claim a share for referral.

This type of marketing approach is no different than the Fan Pages being established by large brands on Facebook. In both cases, users have to opt in to participate in various marketing efforts, essentially making them more valuable than recipients of, say, random email newsletter-based offers.

Here are some other tidbits in the report about Twitter that might be of interest:

• The U.S. has the largest number of Twitter users at 57.4 percent, followed by the UK with 8.2 percent, Canada (5.9 percent), Australia (2.9 percent), Brazil (2.1 percent), Germany (1.6 percent) and the Netherlands (1.3 percent.)
• Nearly 28 percent of Twitter users are above the age of 45, while 26 percent users are between the ages of 15-24.
• About 18.4 percent of tweets emerge from Tweetdeck, while Tweetie accounts for 9.1 percent and Seesmic is at 6 percent of the total. Its web interface accounts for 17.8 percent of total tweets.

BT’s Ribbit is taking on Google Voice with a cloud-based service that combines Internet voice, smart call routing and voicemail transcriptions. Like Google Voice, Ribbit Mobile allows consumers to transfer calls from an existing mobile number to Ribbit’s platform, which includes features such as routing calls to mobile phones and transcribing voicemails. Ribbit Mobile can forward calls to Skype, MSN or Google Talk Accounts, and can alert users to missed calls or new voicemails via e-mail, Skype, Google Talk or text message.

While the offering appears to be a worthy competitor to Google Voice, it also underscores BT’s larger strategy of merging its voice business with the Internet. BT acquired Ribbit in a $105 million deal last year and installed Ribbit founder Ted Griggs as chief technology officer of BT Voice in an attempt to expand beyond traditional cellular telephone service into alternative forms of communication.

BT’s strategy is one that is surely being studied by savvy network operators around the world. Consumers are increasingly turning to web-based services such as Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging to communicate with others, and Skype’s 40 million-plus daily users prove that Internet voice has gained mass-market traction. Voice still accounts for the vast majority of revenues for carriers around the world, but operators will have to embrace alternative forms of communication as the Internet collides with the traditional mobile industry. Whether Ribbit Mobile can overtake Google Voice has yet to be determined, but BT’s strategy of embracing Internet-based communications is refreshingly progressive in the conservative world of mobile telecoms.

For those who thought its email-only device targeted too broad a market, Peek Inc. has gone even more niche — and more absurd — with the first mobile device dedicated entirely to Twitter. TwitterPeek, as the gadget is branded, enables users to read and send tweets, reply, retweet and send direct messages on the go. The device sells for $99 plus an $8 monthly fee or $200 for a lifetime of service.

The problem, of course, is that plenty of phones at that price point and below integrate Twitter services very well (and Twitter’s novelty factor may be wearing thin anyway). Twitter apps are available on $99 smartphones such as the iPhone 3G and Palm Pre, and even cut-rate feature phones can handle basic Twitter functions. But the most laughable thing about the TwitterPeek is the thought that users somehow need a dedicated device for every social networking site or mobile Internet app. It’s akin to having one television on which to watch sports, a second for movies and a third for sitcoms. Oh, and paying separate cable subscriptions for each TV.

That’s not to say there’s no room for dedicated devices in the era of the superphone. The success of the Kindle has demonstrated that users are still willing to pay a premium for a device that’s built for the consumption of a specific kind of content, and — as my colleague Kevin C. Tofel has pointed out — we’re likely to see a wave of new dedicated devices as connectivity moves beyond phones and laptops into a variety of consumer electronics products. But one of Twitter’s key qualities is its ease of use from almost any connected device, from PCs to cutting-edge smartphones to antiquated feature phones. So asking users to pay $100 plus a monthly fee for a Twitter-optimized gadget seems like a dead-end (and downright silly) strategy.

What do you think?

I got several good laughs out of Tsahi Levent-Levi’s speculative post “What If Microsoft Developed Twitter?” In it, he conjures up a Redmond-enhanced version of the microblogging platform that would look and work a little, er, differently from the one we’re using now. “You would have to sign a EULA for each tweet you send out,” he imagines. “You would have to reset your Twitter client every day,” he adds, and “you would have to get used to the blue tweet of death.” Here are four more attributes that we might expect from a Microsoft version of Twitter.

An unabridged eBook version of “War and Peace” would pop up as you load the  necessary software libraries and security patches in preparation for your first tweet of the day:

You would have the terms “Cancer” and “Hippie GPL Rubbish” emblazoned as watermarks on any tweet you send out on the topic of open source software:

As daily software updates arrived, you would have two, and only two options: “Install” and “Remind Me Later:”

Any attempts to use words such as “bang” or “bong” in tweets would be replaced with Bing:

What other enhancements would Microsoft’s version of Twitter have?

Adweek today released its annual list of the hottest 10 digital media companies, some of which stretch the definition of digital media (iPhone, anyone?). The list shows some interesting bias, dumping Google to the No. 4 slot from last year’s No. 1 position primarily because its search algorithms aren’t people-powered like Facebook (No. 1) or real-time like Twitter (No. 3). The ranking also seems focused on what’s been hot for the last year, but it’s missing some big innovations that are getting hotter, like Google’s Android mobile OS or a company that’s pushing the envelope on offering location. I’d suggest Skyhook.  The complete list, below the fold:

1. Facebook
2. Hulu
3. Twitter
4. Google
5. iPhone
6. Huffington Post
7. Bing
8. WSJ
9. Federated Media
10. Viacom’s AddictingGames.com

Facebook has just rolled out an updated version of its news feed that lets users switch between viewing a live version and an older one, where they can see what’s happened since they last logged in. Screenshots of possible news feeds Facebook was testing out began circulating around the web earlier this month.

The social network overhauled the design of its news feed back in the spring to put the stream of real-time updates down the center of the page — similar to micromessaging site Twitter. It also created a “Highlights” section on the right-hand side of the page that contained select older content about your friends’ activity on the site, such as recently uploaded photo albums and links to articles and videos your friends shared. The new version is moving the “Highlights” section to the middle of the page, where it was located prior to the spring redesign.

When asked if Facebook is rolling out the new version to get away from looking similar to Twitter, Facebook product manager Peter Deng said, “I don’t think we were trying to be like Twitter. Status updates have been on the page since 2006.” He added: “We’re showing you content that’s more popular when you first log in. But when you switch to live feed, it looks how it does today.”

The latest news feed design just went live; it will be gradually rolled out to all of Facebook’s 300 million users throughout the day.

After Microsoft and Google announced search deals with Twitter yesterday, several startups that focus on real-time search — OneRiot, Wowd and Collecta (see disclosure at the bottom) — put on a positive front in an article by Jolie O’Dell at ReadWriteWeb, saying their businesses will be around for the long haul. But the entrance of the two tech giants in a market originally dominated by startups is likely to send shivers down any company’s spine.

Without a doubt, it will be a tough road ahead for real-time search upstarts. Not only are Google and Microsoft household names, but Google has long dominated the U.S. search market — it captured 80 percent of it last month. A slate of real-time Twitter search engines sprouted up over the summer, and though many of them are compelling products, here’s a reality check: How many of your non-tech savvy friends actually know about them?

But it’s not all doom and gloom for some. After viewing Microsoft’s demo of its Twitter search feature on Bing, I discovered it’s lacking some of the features offered by other real-time search engines. TweetMeme, for instance, aggregates the most popular links on Twitter, including YouTube videos and photos, based in part on the number of times people have retweeted them. While Bing lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic, so far it’s limited to just news and blog articles.

Another startup that offers something Bing doesn’t is OneRiot, which launched a product last month that offers up sponsored links to content related to the real-time search results it renders. OneRiot’s founders believe this product will be the standard monetization model for Twitter-focused apps, which could be potent enough to help the company stick around in the long-term.

There’s one caveat, however. Google’s Twitter search offering has yet to be released, so we’ll have to wait and see what kind of a threat it poses in the real-time search engine space.

Disclosure: Collecta is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

MySpace’s recent reorientation to emphasize entertainment over friends makes it more similar to Twitter than Facebook, said News Corp Chief Digital Officer Jonathan Miller at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. “Twitter is about asymmetrical relationships,” said Miller, while Facebook users have mostly symmetrical friend relationships. “MySpace is in between. One of the things we have to focus on right now is you have to declare a major.”

But ultimately MySpace will end up more like Twitter. “MySpace is more about interests, which is followers and followed, than just the pure friend thing,” said Miller. “But obviously I believe we have the ability to be much richer [than Twitter].”

In some respects this shift is quite obvious, but it’s interesting to hear News Corp spell it out. And Miller is right: Though Twitter is quite the phenomenon right now, MySpace does have more features. Twitter is at its core a broadcast system, whereas MySpace can get a lot deeper into music and other content.

Google will include Twitter’s real-time status updates into its search results, Google VP Marissa Mayer said in a blog post released this afternoon. This comes hot off the heels of Microsoft’s announcement this morning that it will include status update feeds from Facebook and Twitter into its search engine Bing.

Mayer wrote in the post:

We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

When asked at the Web 2.0 Summit if Facebook would reach a similar deal with Google, COO Sheryl Sandberg, a former Google executive, said this afternoon that the company had “nothing to announce.”

Updated with detail from the Web 2.0 conference: Microsoft is set to announced this morning during the Web 2.0 Summit separate nonexclusive deals with Twitter and Facebook, deals that were first reported by Kara Swisher over at AllThingsD, which would enable Microsoft to serve real-time status updates from those two social sites within its Bing search engine. This news comes one day after Twitter CEO Evan Williams deferred a question about pending data mining deals with Microsoft and Google.

Financial terms of the deals are unknown. And the implications will be different for Twitter than for Facebook. While most status updates on Twitter are publicly searchable, updates on Facebook are primarily kept private between users and their friends. Not all of Facebook’s status updates will be searchable in Bing’s real-time feed, according to Swisher.

Update: Yusef Medhi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s online audience business, took the stage at the conference to demo a beta version of its Twitter real-time search feed, which is now live. Medhi identified Twitter as the leader in the real-time space and said its Facebook search feed will be rolled out later.

In the Bing Twitter feed, you can choose to see either the most recent tweets about a search term or the most relevant tweets about that term. To render a list of the most relevant tweets, Bing takes into account the author of the tweet, the quality of the message and how often it’s been retweeted.

Bing also provides a tag cloud of the most popular terms being discussed across the Twitter network and lets you see popular embedded links about a certain topic. For example, you can view a list of NY Yankees articles people are tweeting most about. Another plus is that Bing identifies the source of the article’s shortened URL, which prevents you from unknowingly clicking on a bad link.

Twitter’s U.S. traffic to its main site has slowed, CEO Evan Williams said during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this afternoon, but said that the company was launching new things that “will pick that back up.”

It’s still unclear how the micromessaging site intends to make money, however. “It’s not like we’re spending our days looking in the couch cushions for our revenue model,” said Williams. “You wouldn’t raise that much money unless you have something plausible.” This was a clear reference to the company receiving $100 million funding last month that valued it at a whopping $1 billion.

Reports surfaced earlier this month that Twitter was in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google to serve real-time tweets in their search engines. But Williams was coy when asked onstage about these rumored search deals, quipping, “Whose deals?”

Right now, Twitter is toying with the idea of putting ads on its site, though co-founder Biz Stone said it doesn’t plan to do so this year. But last week, Twitter launched a mobile version of its service in Japan that will incorporate money-making features such as banner ads. This mobile version will be a testing ground for the company and will help determine whether it will ultimately incorporate advertising on its site. Twitter has also made clear that it will offer enterprise services for businesses, including analytics and verified accounts. Earlier this summer, the upstart made a step in that direction by rolling out its Twitter 101 web-based guide aimed at helping companies understand its service.