If you remember anything from what I’m about to tell you, remember this: At some point, Twitter needs to do an IPO so that all of its inital investors, and not the poor schmucks investing after it goes public, can cash out and make themselves rich.

Got it?

Good.

So now that we’re teetering on the brink of another recession, and Facebook continues to tank as a stock (BURN BABY BURN!), the people with a lot of money invested in Twitter are getting really nervous.

How nervous? An anonymous source or two told Bloomberg that Twitter expects to do about a billion dollars in sales by 2014.

This comes on the heels of news that Twitter usage has gone up a measly two percentage points in two years among Americans from 13% to 15%, although only 8% of which actively use the service on any given day, and how they use the service is undefined by Nielsen.

(Twitter’s own information says about 40% of that 8% don’t tweet, but just use the service to consume information. So … Twitter ain’t exactly the boomtown the company needs the public, and future suckers shareholders, to believe it is.)

Twitter, of course, officially declined comment on the Bloomberg story, but it doesn’t take a huge cognitive leap to realize that the information either came from the company, or someone with a lot of money invested in it.

You can’t cash out if people realize how shitty your business model is, you know?

And make no mistake, it is a shitty business model. Twitter is a fun tool, I enjoy using it, but advertising to people on a service where they sign up for what information they want to receive is a non-starter, and frankly, anyone looking to start or operate a business with an ad-supported business model on the Web is fucked.