Look, I understand that businesses need to adapt. I also understand the stresses involved of keeping investors happy, especially if you're approaching your market without an ounce of discernable profit.

It was May of 2009 when Twitter founder Biz Stone was quoted at the Reuters Global Technology Summit that his company would not be doing advertising as a source of their revenue. The rest of the business world said "well, what will you do ?"

It was a year later in May of 2010 that Twitter drastically changed the way that 3rd party sites can automatically can "modify" and "post" to their accounts. I remember thinking to myself "Twitter is going to look at all the ways that people are making money using their API and take them for themselves." Why wouldn't they ?

Case in point: Recently, Twitter has recently began pushing promoted tweets. (If you haven't seen it yet, the big push is intended for next month) A concept not so unfamiliar to me as fellow Floridian, colleague, and friend Ted Murphy, CEO of IZEA, has been doing it since August of 2009 with his SponsoredTweets product. Although it still is successful, the product has undoubtedly had to make changes in order to accomodate the adjusted API rules placed in May.

Lets also not forget the "pay-per-follower" accounts they rolled out last year. The only other profit generating piece in my mind that isn't *exactly* advertising. Kinda. Sorta. Recent numbers show a 1% to 3% "engagement rate" for those of you out there who are number crunchers that actually want results and ROI in social media. Sheesh.

The purpose of this post was not to call out the founders of Twitter for their comment in 2009. I completely understand and to be honest, applaud what they are doing. The purpose of this post was to make other entrepreneurs understand what it is like to be under the weight of your investors.  I just hope it wasn't forced upon the founders of twitter with investor moxie. I've seen investor moxie first hand, and believe me you don't want to be on the recieving end of a talk that begins with "So.... about that 360 million dollars we gave you". To quote the great rappers of our generation "Mo' money, mo' problems". Or perhaps I should say, "I got 99 problems, but a sponsored tweet ain't one ...".