It’s not as if Twitter was looking, but who wouldn’t answer when opportunity knocks carrying $35m? Though Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has confirmation that the actual sum raised is in excess of $35m. Announcing the funding on the official Twitter blog, Biz Stone says the shot in the arm will mean recruitment and (at last) revenue generation, based on the service’s recent stats:

“Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us.”

Tameka Kee at paidContent puts the news into context:

“Twitter’s popularity has surged, despite its lack of a business model, and has garnered plenty of media attention since mid-2008: President Obama planned to use Twitter to announce his running mate at the start of the election, CNN covered how breaking news spread through the service, and VCs have even invested in Twitter-related startups like TweetDeck and StockTwits. Meanwhile, Twitter has been the subject of acquisition rumors (including a botched deal with Facebook)—and all this for a company that only recently hired its first business development exec.”

Jeremiah Owyang is impressed but not surprised after Twitter’s support crew helped him out in no time flat after spammer(s) spoofed his account and linked to a ‘get rich quick’ scam. His advice?

“Twitter needs to keep the network clean, why? Brands are very interested in this community, I’ve been getting more and more requests from clients to discuss twitter, and whether or not they should engage and how. Just today, Forbes captured my thoughts on how I believe Twitter can monetize from corporate services, read why and how.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has another theory about how Twitter will evolve from here; the service creates a real-time database of thoughts and opinions about pretty much anything under the sun — bringing the possibility of mining the thought stream within reach.

“What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

[...]

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Lidija Davis at ReadWriteWeb has a fascinating report from the SMX Conference, where Vint Cerf shared his thoughts on the future of the internet, IPTV and advertising, bit rot and the mechanics of ‘the intercloud’.

The Guardian reports that Friends Reunited is up on the block.

Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK reports that Fav.or.it will be pushing into corporate blog tracking.