Is Twitter adding a new pay-for-followers scheme to boost sagging brands and would-be celebs? What about a new real-time analytics tool to make sense of up-to-the-minute conversation streams? These are but two of the latest bits of detail to come from Twitter watchers and the legions of tea-leaves-readers out there trying to figure out how this wildly popular service, which went down again last night during the World Cup finals, will some day make money.

Let’s look first at the more controversial of the two: tools to boost followers. If true, as All Things Digital notes, it would represent a major about-face. Twitter used to not only look down upon such follow-me-I’ll-follow-you services, but it actually booted legit accounts it thought were gaming the system by trying to force new followers into the fold. But times, as the old song goes, they are a changing. And Twitter needs to start showing a path to break-even. As All Things D writes: “TweetUp, a prominent and well-funded new start-up, has its own follower-building offering, so perhaps that has caught Twitter’s eye.”

Twitter’s press team at the moment is distancing itself from the speculation, but look for such a service to emerge if Promoted Tweets fails to take off.

Moving now to the murmurs of a Twitter-powered real-time analytics engine…Twitter engineer Ryan King posted to the Twitter blog on Friday more geeky details about new service enhancements, including: “Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses [open source distributed database Apache] cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally.”

Currently, Twitter’s engineers use it to stay on top of local trends and top-tweeted discussion topics that appear on the homepage.

ReadWriteWeb is convinced this all points to a powerful new real-time Twitter analytics tool, a potential gold mine, we would add, for any brand or organization wishing to monitor public sentiment around certain discussion topics in real-time. Plenty of tools promise this level of sentiment-crunching, but the tools are only effective if Twitter can reasonably store and sort the tens of millions of Tweets published every hour.

It will be interesting to follow these two developments. Even if neither make it to the light of day it’s good to know Twitter’s profits-push could mean a more dependable service for outfits looking to mine the social media sphere for relevant conversation and to build community.