I only ask because, as you may or may not have heard, the ambient broadcasting / continuous partial attention phenomenon that is Twitter has stepped up to the big leagues and has acquired VC funding — so that it may continue to expand its Twittering services and provide this valuable service to more and more people at a great price.

Ha ha — of course I jest, because they aren’t actually selling anything yet. Not advertising, not memberships, and no, not even swag.

Now, let’s be fair. I like the idea behind twitter. I kind of get how its different and how its important and how no one is really doing what its doing, to the extent what its doing — Leo Laporte aside, that is — even if I don’t personally use it.

But its an entity that’s poised for growth without any forseeable business model. Or, if I could dumb it down for my own personal notes: they don’t have any means for making money.

Union Square Adventures Ventures, the VC group that is now funding Twitter, has boldly acknowledged this fact:

The question everyone asks is “What is the business model?” To be completely and totally honest, we don’t yet know.

In FACT, its the same quote he made almost two years ago when asked about funding del.icio.us. Which … got acquired by Yahoo! Which, in turn leads one to speculate if Union Squre Ventures is plowing dough (an unspecified amount of dough as far as I can tell) into Twitter so that it might in turn get acquired for multiples of the amount of dough-age its currently investing.

Ok, fair enough.

But when, in all of this, will anyone really be concerned with doing what any real business does? You know — making money? I mean, really making an earnest go of it? Because I’d love to know when, if the folks at Twitter aren’t interesting in being acquired (stop snickering), that point might be.

Rather, when does throwing money at a growing enterprise that actually *COSTS* money to support –whether it be infrastructure and bandwidth, or, for example, paying for all those boxes of ramen noodles — stop making sense when it isn’t actually making any money back? I’m curious when the actual inflection point be where Union Square Ventures would turn around and say “this is a bottomless maw that has an endless appetite for cash — this has to change?”

Or, how about a scenario where Twitter rebuffs weak and tepid acquisition efforts, tries to monetize by throwing Adwords and more up, but finds that its still miserable in terms of its bottom line. That is, there’s more going out than coming in. Because bandwidth — especially when festivals like SXSW roll around — cost real money. Well, what *then*?

Hey, I don’t really have an answer to any of these questions. But, just for a second, I’d love to see a company like Twitter NOT go the acquisition route and do something really clever to actually make money as a stepping stone to forming a real business. Either that, or fail miserably, in spite of an interesting and worthwhile idea, as a case study that reinforces the importance of actually making real money.