“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

This is a company that was reported to have turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook – but probably not because they wanted to be a nonprofit. They knew (or at least hoped) that the site would eventually be worth a LOT more than that, once they figured out what sort of revenue streams they could generate, of course.

Back in December, CNET wrote an article about Twitter’s co-founder and CEO Evan Williams having a plan for generating revenue, just not telling anyone what it was yet. There were hints at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users. Looks like they’re still hinting at it.

It’s all very cloak and dagger at this point, which is fine, since it’s not a public company (although this guy clearly wants them to be) and it’ll help build interest. Williams is someone who co-founded Blogger and claimed, in the CNET article, that Twitter will dwarf Blogger.

The traffic numbers are beginning to support that claim. According to Alexa’s Twitter profile, it was the 224th ranked site in the world yesterday, based on a combined measure of page views and users (reach). Its three-month change in ranking is 376. Its reach has gone up 65.5% in three months and its page views per user has gone up 41.9% in that same time period. Those are some pretty big numbers for a site that was already pretty popular back in November.

But the question remains – does popularity equal dollar signs, especially in this economic environment?

UPDATE: After digging around on the Net a bit, I found out that hours after the Marketing article appeared, Stone denied that report – on Twitter’s blog. Oh, the intrigue.