THE REAL VALUE OF TWEETS

Google and Microsoft are paying Twitter $25 million to crawl the short posts, or tweets, that users send out on the micro-blogging service. It sounds like big money. Enough for Twitter to turn a small profit in 2009, say two people familiar with the company's finances. But do the math and the payments look less impressive. Truth is, no one has figured out how to make real money off of tweets yet. Google and Microsoft are paying $15 million and $10 million, respectively, as a bet on the future. For Google and Microsoft, the real payoff may come from tying tweets to local information about products.