While the world worked itself into a frenzy over Facebook's IPO earlier this month, the other social media giant Twitter has said it will postpone plans to go public for years because it is not ready to disclose its earnings to the market, according to reports.

In an email obtained by CNN, Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo told staff last year that the firm will not be taking the same path as Facebook in making an initial public offering (IPO) anytime soon.

"We don't want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth," Costolo wrote in his August email, according to CNN.

"We're not ready to be a public company for a couple years."

For the last year, Twitter shareholders have been banned from selling more than 20 per cent of their shares.

The reason for this is that if companies have more than 500 shareholders owning one class of equity shares the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates the business to disclose financial results.

Twitter told V3 it could not comment on the email.

The firm has been discussing possibilities of an IPO route to revenue growth since 2009.

In related news French president Nicholas Sarkozy has joined Twitter. The president has not always shown a liking for emerging technologies and the social web, particularly when the new technologies come into conflict with traditional media establishments.

It remains to be seen if he proves as sensational as some of the other recent converts to the micro-blogging service, most notably Rupert Murdoch who has already hit out at Google on the service.

ORLANDO: With IBM beating the drum on the use of social tools and collaborative software, its chief information officer Jeanette Horan, outlined the firm's own work in these areas, to show it practices what it preaches.

With almost half a million full-time employees (currently around 450,000) IBM has a huge workforce using a vast array of tools, both internally and externally and the figures she revealed are truly astounding:

•    On average 360,000 staff use the firm’s instant messaging platform every day.
•    This generates a staggering 50 million instant messages per day.
•    There are 198,000 members of staff on Facebook.
•    A much smaller 20,000 are on Twitter.
•    LinkedIn Is the most popular platform, though, with 281,000 users.
•    20,000 members of staff run their own internal blog on the firm’s Connections tool.

She also revealed its willingness to shake things up by explaining it runs a reverse-mentoring system in the company where some of the youngest new staff members teach its most senior executives how to use the latest social tools.

However, one area the firm admitted it is still addressing is the growing issue of what should happen to employees' Twitter accounts after they leave the company.
 
Carol Sormilic, vice president global workforce and web processes, explained to V3 that it is an area the firm is currently debating internally, but has yet to reach an answer.

One area where the firm is up and running, though, is letting staff bring their own devices to work after the end of a two-year pilot that involved feedback from 20,000 members of staff, which actually equates to just five per cent of its workforce.

This led to the creation of a set of policies that include an enforced eight-digit password for each device to access the corporate network and Horan revealed that she herself uses her own personal BlackBerry phone as her work device.

On the issue of cloud computing, Horan explained that IBM operates six datacentres to help it run a private cloud computing network as the size of the firm makes this a viable return on investment.

“We have the scale to be able to see the benefits of managing the cloud behind the firewall,” she added.

As well as a fascinating insight into the day-to-day IT demands of a firm the size of IBM, its willingness to embrace new trends and give staff the power to take advantage of new tools may give IT leaders in other, smaller, firms the courage to go forward with their own plans in these areas.

VIENNA: HP has said it expects to see 50 zettabytes of data being created every year by 2020 as a growing number of online users generate huge amounts of content on sites like Twitter. A zettabyte is one billion terabytes.

Prith Banerjee (pictured above on stage), head of HP Labs, said at the firm's Discover event that the number of online citizens across the globe will soar to four billion by 2020, driving huge growth in data creation.

"By 2020 there could be as many as four billion online interacting on social networks. While now there are 250 million tweets per day this will rise to tens of millions," he said.

"There's also going to be a huge increase of sensors on the network measuring everything from temperature to heart monitoring. We expect there to be one trillion sensors by 2020."

Banerjee added that HP expects a whopping 30 billion mobile phones to be in use by 2020, which is a fairly terrifying thought.

Clearly the claims have been made to underline the theme of the Discover event that businesses need to get better at managing structured and, crucially, unstructured data. The key launch of Autonomy's Idol 10 platform at the show could be seen as the centrepiece to this.

The predictions from HP also vary from those produced by IBM, which said in 2010 that it expects 35 zettabytes of data to be created annually by 2020, and business intelligence vendor SAS, which put the figure at 15 zettabytes by 2015.

Whichever firm is right, there's clearly no doubt that data is going to grow hugely, and that businesses need to think carefully about how they use this avalanche of information.

Ever since the riots that swept the UK in August there's been much debate and hand-wringing over what should be done with social media sites during times of unrest, with the government even threatening to shut down sites like Twitter.

Thankfully, Thersea May and co. seem to have come to their senses and said they will not be seeking additional powers to block sites. There was a timely reminder that these services can benefit law enforcement agencies on Thursday when it was revealed that over 600 police officers are now on Twitter.

Speaking at a Westminster Forum event, Paul Reilly, a lecturer in media and communications at the University of Leicester, noted that since the riots the number of police officers on Twitter had grown to 632.

"Every territorial force now has a Twitter feed as part of steps being taken to use this tool to engage and provide accurate information and stop rumours circulating," he added.

"Police in Northern Ireland have been particularly proactive in the use of social media and received praise for this and other forces are using these tools more effectively now but there has been a degree of caution among some too."

He added that this number had grown significantly since the riots as more officers out on the streets look for ways to engage with their community.

Furthermore, not only does Twitter offer engagement but it also offers a wealth of information that police forces can access, as Justin Crump, the chief executive of security intelligence consultancy firm Sibylline, explained.

"Social media is open source intelligence on steroids. It moves at a hell of a pace and can be very biased and you have to be very disciplined to deal with it but if you integrate people, processes and technology you can gain benefits," he said.

Indeed, V3 spoke with South Yorkshire Police in October who are using Twitter to increase engagement with the community and track potential disturbances, as police across the land prove that shutting down social media sites would be a disastrous decision.

Twitter is now an established corporate social media tool, and many companies have policies on its use and encourage staff to exploit it as a way to interact with customers, create brand loyalty and drive traffic to their sites.

However, it's still a medium that can cause problems, as that bastion of wire-breaking news, Associated Press (AP), discovered this week when two of its journalists covering the removal of Occupy protestors in New York were arrested.

Staff at the firm immediately posted this breaking update about the arrests on Twitter. But they were subsequently reprimanded for not putting it on the wire first, thereby undermining the value of AP's service and making Twitter the first source of the story.

However, Reuters' social media editor, Anthony de Rosa, questioned AP's warnings to staff, arguing that it is more important to adapt to the use of new tools than doggedly stick to old working practices.

"To bury our head in the sand and act like Twitter (and who knows what else comes into existence next month or five years from now?) isn't increasingly becoming the source of what informs people in real time is ridiculous," he said on his blog.

This difference in opinion on how Twitter should be handled by two of the world's leading digital media wires highlights the thought that all businesses must put into how they want staff to use social media, especially Twitter.

As we've reported on more than one occasion the service's instant, non-stop, real-time ethos can catch out those unaware of just how dangerous posting without thinking can be.

Furthermore, in an update to the story, AP's executive editor, Kathleen Carroll, told journalists that releasing such information on Twitter can put colleagues at risk.

"Even in the US, it's not outlandish to think that a tweet that's taken by someone in authority to be opinionated or sarcastic could lead to one of our staffers being held longer than necessary," Carroll noted.

"Imagine you're that staffer. Would you want to be kept behind bars by a colleague's thoughtless tweet?"

There aren't going to be many firms that have to worry about whether a message on Twitter could lead to a member of staff being banged up for longer than necessary, but it shows that you've got to think of all the possibilities in this brave new world of social media.

Until 2006 the word 'tweet' was the noise a bird made, and no more. Now, though, a 'tweet' refers to a message written on the 100 million-strong micro-blogging site Twitter and the company is laying claim to the word under trademark.

However, Twitter has run into a problem as the word 'tweet' is already owned by an advertising firm called Twittad in the slightly jarring phrase 'Let Your Ad Meet Tweets'.

So, like any self-respecting US company, Twitter is suing Twittad. Specifically, it is going after the firm for a violation of a trademark that Twitter argues it should own as it is clearly the reason the term is popular, citing 'retweet' and 'tweetdeck' as evidence.

"This action arises from the registration of the mark 'Let Your Ad Meet Tweets' by Twittad in connection with online advertising services for use on Twitter," the suit reads.

"Defendant's registration unfairly exploits the widespread association by the consuming public of the mark 'tweet' with Twitter, and threatens to block Twitter from its registration and legitimate uses of its own mark."

Such litigiousness over a word previously associated with twitchers such as Bill Oddie is not the first time that tech firms have gone at it over some words. Apple famously lost a preliminary injunction case against Amazon over the term 'app store'.

Sky Broadcasting also tried to take on Skype over the use of the word 'Sky' in its name.

It appears that the lawyers of Silicon Valley are prepared to scour the dictionary from morning to night looking for more words over which they can suggest their client has dominion.

Despite all the tough talking rhetoric from the prime minister following the recent UK riots about potentially banning social media in times of unrest, the meeting between the home secretary, police chiefs and social media representatives on Thursday steered well clear of this contentious topic.

It is understood that the issue of restricting services such as Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), all of which were to a lesser or greater extent blamed for the riots, was never a topic for discussion.

This is despite calls from Tottenham MP David Lammy for a ban on BBM at times of social disorder and David Cameron's own admission that the government "is working with the police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality".

Instead, the meeting is believed to have focused on how the police can build up their skills to monitor social networks more effectively.

"We welcome the fact that this was a dialogue about working together to keep people safe rather than about imposing new restrictions on internet services," said Facebook in a statement.

"We were pleased to highlight our array of effective reporting tools and the relationships we have built with law enforcement to keep the site safe for the 30 million people in the UK use Facebook - especially during times of crisis."

A similarly bland statement came from the Home Office.

"The home secretary, along with the culture secretary and foreign office minister Jeremy Browne, has held a constructive meeting with the Association of Chief Police officers, the police and representatives from the social media industry," it read.

"The discussions looked at how law enforcement and the networks can build on the existing relationships and co-operation to crack down on the networks being used for criminal behaviour."

It's certainly good news that the government apparently understands the good that social networks can do in rallying communities after and during such heinous events and in providing law enforcement with invaluable intelligence in catching those who organised such crimes.

We all suspected the worst when the prime minister came out with his initial statements, but thankfully another knee-jerk reaction from out-of-touch politicians has not reared its head, giving way instead to a more thoughtful and considered approach.

It remains to be seen whether rights campaigners will seek assurances from the social networks that private data is not just being handed over to police in these situations as a matter of course.

While it's good to see co-operation between the tech companies and law enforcement, no-one would want that relationship to begin eroding individual privacy rights online.

Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have finally revealed the name of their first spin-off project since restarting Obvious Corporation, the incubation company that spawned Twitter.

Lift is the name of an app and a start-up run by chief executive Tony Stubblebine, along with Jon Crosby and Connor Montgomery.

In a brief blog post entitled Unlocking Potential, Stone explained that, in exchange for some equity in the start-up, Obvious will help with things like "strategy, design, funding and recruiting".

The project remains in a private alpha stage at present, but interested parties can sign up to be part of the Lift beta when it arrives.

"It's important never to delude ourselves into thinking that technology changes the world. People are responsible for change. Technology just helps out," wrote Stone.

"Our approach is threefold: build, partner and invest. We've started working on some ideas ourselves, we're researching how best to create an investment vehicle, and today we're thrilled to announce our first official partnership."

Obvious is not the only the only buzzy Silicon Valley venture gearing up for a big launch in the coming months.

Over in the Mission District of San Francisco, Digg founder Kevin Rose has been incubating his own projects with his latest company, Milk.

Focusing on mobile development, the Milk first project, dubbed Oink, already has its own Twitter account and holding page.