T&A: Knowledge at Wharton, an online business journal by Pennsylvania State’s Wharton School of Business published an article analyzing the business viability of the current Twitter model in the world of social networking sites.

While general predictions see a likelihood that the San Francisco-based Twitter company might get bought up by a larger, more diversified Internet-based company, the argument now is whether the company should continue on its traffic-building run (it’s only three years old) or relook at a money-making model. (Editor opinions: 1)

According to Wharton, the free service, which allows a member to send messages of up to 140 characters, is currently the fastest growing social networking site, with followers monitoring the Twitter posts of celebrities and politicians in the thousands. In just one year alone, the number of registrants grew from less than half a million to seven million.

Among the many beneficial uses of Twitter is citizen reporting, where members can Twitter about something via their mobile devices as and when something major (street protests, a crash, an accident, etc.) happens. But to convert that into something that users would want to pay a service for is another major challenge.

David Chieng, Editor, HWM Singapore

David (HWM Singapore): The Web’s been rife with rumors and speculation on who should buy Twitter, who’d benefit the most from buying Twitter, and what Twitter should be doing to capitalize on the insane streak of traffic that’s been hitting their service in the past year or so.

For all the brouhaha over Twitter as a search engine, at least, Twitter has quite some ways to go, simply because despite the recent traffic onslaught, they’ve yet to build up a decent database of information that can be properly mined.

A search for the new J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie for example, nets some excellent and informative 140-char reviews, but a search for ‘great food in Singapore’ ends up with a smattering of comments, only one of which links to any significant information.

Newer trends bring up great information that can be mined, like the recent Singapore-based AWARE saga (search for #awaresg for examples), but anything older probable wouldn’t net any great amount of info.

That, and the fact that the 140-char requirement is a serious limitation when it comes to truly useful search results. The world wouldn’t be what it is today if Google had limited its search results to 140 chars. Then again, all Twitter needs to do is to continue building the hype.

With a little luck and a great deal more data under their belt, I’m pretty confident that a viable business model will emerge.