Titans of tweet: Twitter founders Evan Williams (far left), Biz Stone (in eyeglasses), and Jack Dorsey (far right) hoist cold ones with Ted Wang, a law partner at Fenwick and West (seated on bar), and venture capitalists Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, and Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital. The number of Twitter users surged to 75 million last year and the company inked deals worth a reported $25 million with Google and Bing, but its real fortunes depend on proving that tweets have value. “We don’t think we are there yet,” says Williams. But, he adds, “it’s clear there are a lot of ways to make money.” Credit: Ben Baker/Redux

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At the microblogging company Twitter's San Francisco headquarters, in the sixth-floor conference room, founder Evan Williams was declining to tell me anything about the company's strategies to earn revenues when, suddenly, his cofounder Biz Stone blurted, "Whoa!" It was 10:10 a.m. on January 7, and it would prove to be the latest Twitter Moment, showing how far the service has moved beyond its early status as an amplifier of personal minutiae and confession. A minor earthquake had just struck: a magnitude 4.1 temblor centered 45 miles to the southeast. Throughout the Bay Area, thousands of Twitter users seized their smart phones or PCs to peck out 140-character-or-less tweets--updates in the form of text messages, Web-based instant messages, or posts on Twitter's website. Quake-related tidbits coursed through the company's servers at the rate of 296 per minute, according to tracking done by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The quake was felt more strongly in Mountain View, the site of Google's headquarters--which was metaphorically appropriate. In the first seconds and minutes after the quake, anyone tapping "earthquake Mountain View" (or the name of any other nearby municipality) into Google's search field found that the only hits pertaining to the new quake were ... tweets. While the Google results page included direct information feeds from the USGS and a slick Google Maps display of recent temblors, none reflected the latest event. Official USGS-confirmed data on the quake wouldn't show up until 10:20 a.m. But at 10:12 a.m., the sixth-highest search return was a rolling scroll of tweets posted "seconds ago": Wow, that was an earthquake jolt in Mountain View!