Today was a perfect storm for Twitter, the microblogging application led by Evan Williams (who created Pyra Labs and Blogger, selling it to Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in 2003 as blogging went bigtime). The company was all over business technology media, making an appearance at the Wall Street Journal with a rather ingenue "User's Guide to Twitter" and in the New York Times with an explanation of why Twitter turned down a merger with Facebook.

Katherine Boehret likes Twitter but takes it to task for many of the things Twitter clients like Twhirl do wonderfully; notify you of @ replies (when someone Tweets you directly using an @ sign before your name, i.e. @sarahgilbert), for instance, and complains of the tinyurl conversion issue which most Twitter old hands work around by using their own url shortening services (many of my friends built their own). She doesn't even approach the question that's on everyone's minds: How will Twitter make money?

Claire Cain Miller does approach the question, but doesn't have much of an answer. Her analysis of why Twitter turned down Facebook is brief -- it wasn't the right time, Twitter has "too much to do" yet -- and needs to learn how to make money. The one hazy concept we all agree on is that Twitter might charge businesses to talk to customers with its service; providing proactive alerts to companies when Twitterers complain about their service, giving them the opportunity to respond (and perhaps charging for consulting on how to best make use of the interaction) might be worth a lot. A few businesses now are very good at that; when I complained about my Comcast internet connectivity on Twitter, for instance, I quickly was pinged by a Comcast technician offering to help.

One particularly brilliant user of Twitter for business purposes is Rael Dornfest (who is a friend of mine, so I suppose I'm biased);