Twitter's a pretty lucky company. Few get two bytes at the hype apple in rapid succession, but this social media platform has found a way to make up for its disappointing announcement about its advertising model. According to VentureBeat, Twitter might unveil its long-awaited, heavily-hyped and possibly investor-satisfying corporate accounts. Next month, at its inaugural Chirp developer conference, we could finally see what might just be the foundation of Twitter's business model.

I'm sure everyone knows about the growth problems at the social-networking site. This recent article at Reuters discusses them. Morale at the company appears to be waning. Unique visitors aren't what they used to be. An ad agreement with Google (GOOG) is about to expire; any new transaction on that front may not be as valuable now that MySpace has been relegated to not-as-cool-as-it-used-to-be status.

Where there are plenty of women, you're bound to find more and more men. Though the gain was small, the number of men on Facebook grew faster than women in February 2010, making the social networking site look a lot like every hot club in Manhattan -- men chasing women.

Facebook picked up an additional 5 million users in the United States last month, reaching 113 million. Since the middle of last year, the social media site has gained users every month. Though every demographic is showing increases, men are leading the charge. In January, women owned 56.07% of Facebook use, a share of activity that fell to 55.6% in February. Among users age 18 to 44, new male users outpaced females by approximately 2:1.

Apparently, all the hype wasn't worth it. After Twitter COO Dick Costolo explained that the company was going to unveil a "non-traditional" advertising model and claimed that "people will love it," what we're seeing is a foray into decidedly charted territory.

According to AllThingsD, Twitter's ad model will resemble the one that has been so successful for search and online ad giant Google (GOOG). Ads, essentially, will be tied to search.

Yawn.

Every day now brings with it 50 million tweets, according to Twitter's blog. And that number specifically excludes tweets from spammers. In 2007, daily volume was a mere 5,000. Every second, 600 tweets are unleased.

There is no shortage of 140-character outbursts, putting the microblogging site in direct competition with social media behemoth Facebook for ownership of the social media user's most current thoughts. Facebook boasts more than 60 million daily status updates, despite having a 400 million-strong user base that dwarfs Twitter's nearly 60 million. The fact that Twitter is so much smaller than Facebook only makes its ownership of the status update more compelling.

The financial crisis, employment market and social media explosion have converged, providing a new level of clarity into what is happening in the world around us. Where was ground zero for this financial catastrophe? Well, according to the LinkedIn blog, five companies have shown the most action: Barclays (BCS), Credit Suisse (CS), Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM). Interestingly, Goldman Sachs (GS), among the biggest winners now that we're pulling out from the recession, didn't see as much play.

Twitter is at a crossroads right now. What it does in the next few months will either solidify it as a long-term contributing member of the global economy ... or relegate it to a history that includes TheGlobe.com and talking sock puppets. The company posted solid growth stats in 2009, but most of the upside came in the first half of the year, leaving the company flat from the beginning of July through the end of the year.

Revenue came into the company in October through real-time search deals with Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), but they involved multiyear deals, which means the company needs to find new ways to make money. Maybe its advertising model will be accelerated as a result. With the user trend flat, however, and the dearth of Twitter use occurring on the website, there are flaws in the advertising model ... unless there's another way to look at the market.