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The question of what Twitter is going to do to make money seems to come up now and then. So far, there seems to be no attempt to make money with the service. Are they waiting for critical mass? Are they holding out for a buy out? Are they going to sell the solution as a platform?

Jason Calicanis offers three business models that make Twitter a billion-dollar business in 12-24 months:

1. In feed advertising
2. SMS Advertising
3. Subscriptions

You may remember Jason was big on pushing Google into offering professional level webmail for clients. Free services with optional premium or business class versions that are on faster servers makes a lot of sense. When I worked at 451 we paid for the pro version of Akismet, a service you can get for free. I think a combination of any of these would work pretty well.

Jason’s post was in response to Allen’s Is Twitter F’ed? post. Evan, the guy behind blogger.com, odeo and others, has been known to build a tool before he has a business model for it. In fact, blogger wasn’t even the software they set out to write. They wrote that to help them in their own office while working on another project. So do they already have a business plan and it’s not just apparent yet? Or will they simply have to figure out a way to make money?

If you look at the number of tweets on the site sent via the web, I don’t see any reason they couldn’t also put some ads on the Twitter.com, like Pownce, Facebook and other services do. The people using Twitter are probably still in the top 10% of internet users, the influencer’s and I’m sure advertisers would pay a premium to get their message in front of those people.

Right now, all we can do is wait and see what they do.