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As Twitter is becoming more and more mainstream, the conversation about it’s value (or perceived lack there of) seems to be getting louder and louder. Today there was even talk about a Google acquisition. This chatter has made both my non-techie friends and friends in the technorati circle, alike poo poo all things Twitter. For the techie many wonder if it’s over valued, and over played on media outlets like Tech-Crunch and friends, and for the non-techie many just “don’t get it” (at least until they dive in). In fact super twitterer Robert Scoble got so annoyed last night at people undervaluing twitter that he pontified that Twitter is one of the best brands in decades and that the BW article pointing at 250 million is complete undervaluation and it should be more like 1 Billion.

Why?

Because, to steal a line from my good friend @gammill, “Twitter has become an entirely new social behavior”. No it’s not as revolutionary as the Internet, but nor is it just one more “social networking” thing either. If anything its beginning to bring out the type of shift that is akin to the early days of email. Yes that’s right, it’s become an entirely new way to communicate easily with people. Like it or not, the fact is micro blogging is going to the new and maybe even preferred way of communication for a society that’s becoming busier and busier.

Now stop and think about what that means. When email first was invented it was done largely through the caretakings of the University system, which wasn’t trying to financially capatilize on it. That didn’t come until later (and think about how companies like Hotmail still had a giant exit decades after the invention). Now we have a case where a company actually owns the brand and all of the earlier adopters (counted in the millions) around the next shift in communication. You think that’s worth something - you bet it is.

In fact, (epecially lately) there have been a plethora of new companies popping up to work with the twitter api because of it’s value. Here’s just a few:

• Exectweet - connecting top business folks on twitter
• Cotweet - helps companies reach customers through twitter
• Magpie - an ad network for twitter
• Mashable - a tech blog that  sells ad space to show off company tweets
• Tinker: tracks trends to plug into a monitization model for brands.
• As well as a whole slew of iPhone and Android twitter “premium apps” that mobile users are buying in droves

No doubt, I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of other companies that are already making money off Twitter too(feel free to let me know who I missed in the comments).  Scoble even twittered about companies that were already doing millions in revenue from twitter affiliation.  So now stomp and consider what it means if there is already that lucrative of an ecosystem around a company, that’s not making any money on it’s own yet, is partnering with these monotizing third parties through a rather simple API set, and only has 30 or so employees.  What we are talking about here is basically the poster child for how to grow an ecosystem completely organically.  And Twitter is sitting their patiently, holding the keys to it all.