News of the online social networking site Twitter opening an IPO surfaced on Thursday which it finally confirmed on a tweet on Saturday.
"We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale."
The tweet was eventually went viral with thousands of re-tweet. Investors from the Silicon Valley began tweeting shortly as reported by the USA Today.
"My over/under for Twitter at end of first day of trading: $25B," tweeted David Sacks, a former PayPal executive and founder of start-up Yammer, which Microsoft bought for $1.2 billion last year.
"This is one of those exciting moments in the Valley," said Kevin Hartz, CEO of start-up Eventbrite, who has invested in other successful start-ups including PayPal, Pinterest and Airbnb. "It's just a financing event for Twitter, but it does demonstrate the next step in the life of what is an emerging Internet giant."
Twitter Inc. joined the online world in March 2006 founded by Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone in San Francisco, Calif. Since its official launch in July 2006, it has reached 500 million registered users by 2012 and post an average of 340 million tweets daily. It has also become one of the top 10 most visited websites which others dubbed as the "SMS of the Internet" because users are only allowed 140 characters per tweet.
The company started generating its own revenue through ad services which eMarketer, an N.Y-based market research company, predicted to close at $583 million for 2013 and $1 billion in 2014.
The company is still studying an appropriate valuation for its IPO, probably to not make the same mistake that Facebook had. According to a report by the Financial Times, Twitter is cautiously looking at a $10 billion valuation with shareholders offering as much as $28 per share.
