Venture funding isn't going to pay the bills forever, so eventually Twitter will have to start making serious money, mostly from advertising. The trick is to advertise in a way that doesn't upset users.

Twitter already failed once with the Quick Bar, a of its iPhone app that occasionally showed promoted trending topics on top of users' timelines. Now, the company is experimenting with Promoted Tweets, which show sponsored messages from brands you already follow near the top of your timeline. And soon, Twitter will expand Promoted Tweets to --essentially, putting ads in everyone's feeds--so we'll see how that goes.

Don't become Facebook or Google+

"We're thinking of as how can we simplify the product even further, what can we edit out," CEO Dick Costolo said in a "state of the union" address on Thursday, . That's great. Let those two networks fight a feature war. But please do add more basic functionality to Twitter.com, like notifications for new mentions, and maybe even offer a stripped-down version of the basic Website for users who want it.

Stop the Spam Bots, Already