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“Twitter is even making less money than newspapers” was the most tweeted phrase during the ONA (Online News Association) conference, which took place at the end of last week in San Francisco. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, said it after the host of the event confirmed that the value Twitter had reached and the interest of investors in the business were making journalists jealous.

Company earns money for product development

In late September, Twitter raised US $100 million from investors. It was the second round, after a US $50 million investment in 2006. In February, the company was worth US $250 million but the goal was to raise the value to US $1 billion. And even with many alternatives for making Twitter profitable, Williams said that the development focus would be on the full potential of the tool (such as the recent integration with MySpace), adding value to the company and services first and only worrying about profitability after. In 1999, Williams created Blogger, a publishing system sold to Google five years later.

Lists of users by interests could optimize abundant information

During his presentation, Williams announced some news. Soon the user will be able to create lists of contacts: friends, family, work, celebrities, among others - with the option for the lists to be private or public, so your followers can see the lists. Thus, interactivity and organization of your content will be optimized.

Brazilians can have Twitter in the local language

Among other changes, Williams informed the newspaper Valor Econômico that by 2010 the microblogging site will have a version in Portuguese. The growth of Twitter in Brazil is large - about five million users - and it is among the five countries with the largest number of users. Today you can find Twitter only in English and Japanese.

Visit to Brazil and analytics tools may be the next moves

Biz Stone, another co-founder of Twitter, intends to come to Brazil this month (will he announce more news?) and already announced the possible launch of an analytics tool geared towards corporate accounts. He also said the company plans to hire more than 35 new employees by 2010, among them - announced this week - the new COO, Dick Costolo, who is chief executive and co-founder of the RSS service Feedburner.

Follow updates on the official Twitter blog.

Reader André Sato (who designed the mockup of how Twitter might look in Portuguese) suggested this post and contributed research and writing.