Twitter rules out ads this year

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone made the announcement in his keynote speech at the company’s two-day conference in Los Angeles, California.

Stone said that the company’s immediate focus was to continue to innovate and build new features and revenue-generating products.

"Any kind of approach toward advertising is going to be a while. We're not thinking about that just yet," Stone said.

Twitter recently launched a product in beta called Account Verification, which validates accounts belonging to businesses so users know they have found the correct tweet stream.

In his keynote, Stone confirmed that the company planned to launch paid-for commercial accounts that will feature extra search capabilities and analytics tools.

Twitter was valued at $1bn (£614m) last week, following a new round of funding worth $50m (£30m). The company is said to have about $30m (£18m) in cash.

Twitter’s API lead Alex Payne also spoke at the event. He discussed the planned changes in version 2 of Twitter's API and how users can adjust their applications accordingly. Payne picked out Tweetie, Tweetdeck and CoTweet, as some of the most successful Twitter applications.

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