MediaPost reports that Twitter is planning to launch an advertising platform soon, possibly within the next month. This will be the first move towards 'monetizing' the huge volume of traffic that Twitter now generates, to create some revenue back to the business. The challenge facing Twitter is to do this in a way that won't alienate users and makes it clear that 'tweets' or tags have been sponsored or not.

This comes at a time when Twitter is now handling 50 million 'tweets' a day. The Sydney Morning Herald reports on the latest data provided by Twitter, which demonstrates the massive growth in the service, from users writing 5,000 "tweets" per day in 2007 to 300,000 per day in 2008 and 2.5 million per day in 2009. The latest figures represent a year-on-year growth of 1,400% in the short comments being posted each day, with the current levels averaging 600 tweets per second.