"Twitter’s founders recognized that encouraging people to use a very small number of very tightly controlled forms, billions of times over, creates huge, deeply interconnected, highly creative, and potentially profitable new spaces." - Paul Ford, in BusinessWeek today.

AdAge has found the first tweets sent by several big consumer brands back in 2009. Here's the first tweet from @Google: "I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010" - Read more here.

While she didn't name Twitter specifically, it's perhaps no coincidence that the the Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mary Jo White, said in a speech yesterday that the SEC is concerned that investors may be misled by the “unique financial or operational metrics” tech companies use to tout their success, such as high user numbers. The SEC is concerned that investors may think that these high numbers correlate with high profitability.

Twitter, of course, has yet to make a profit, despite having 232 million users--and that number is growing.

“What if only a fraction of those users are paying customers? What does that mean for future financial results? What if the bulk of the growth in the number of users is in an area where the company has not yet figured out how to turn those users into paying customers? What does that then say about the meaning of user growth rates? White posed.

Twitter doesn't charge its users, and its hard to imagine a future in which it would ever consider such a risky move. White poses some serious questions. But the company is not without a plan. Read about Twitter's vision for a -powered, profitable future here.

Twitter picked a 9-year-old girl with a lemonade stand whose proceeds are used to fight slavery to ring the bell for them. She was joined by Star Trek actor Patrick Stewart and a Boston police officer.

Ringing the bell was the easy part. Twitter can look forward to a lot volatility and noise around its stock in the months to come.

Twitter's launch on the stock market just made a small but select list of founders and investors very, very rich indeed. Some names you'll know, some you won't. To learn more about the Twitter IPO Player's Club members, check out our write ups:

Evan Williams
Jack Dorsey
Dick Costolo
Biz Stone
Adam Bain

...plus a few more folks you may be less familiar with like Peter Currie.

Adam Bain is an interesting Twitter millionaire, with a family man reputation. He was formerly the president of the Audience Network and EVP of product and technology at Fox Interactive--and was at Fox Sports before that. At Twitter he's President of Global Revenue, which has likely been one of the most important roles on the run up to IPO as Twitter tells its revenue growth story and shows its plan to convert growing sales into profits. He's also a bit of a philanthropist, so maybe some of his new net worth will go into helping others.

Ev Williams is Twitter's famous cofounder. His stake is said to be worth over $1.5 billion at Twitter's offering price of $26. A successful entrepreneur he made a lot of money selling Blogger to Google, but he was actually pushed out at Twitter over alleged bad management skills!

Biz Stone, perhaps the most famous Twitter chap after Jack Dorsey, is a slightly mysterious figure at IPO--his absence from Twitter's S-1 form led to a lot of debate. But since he's no longer an officer of the company, and doesn't own more than 5% stock he didn't have to appear. Assuming he does own 5%, though, he may have made about $600 million at the stock's launch price.

These names are going to be in the media for a while, because a sudden income of millions, even billions of dollars, means you can have quite an ongoing impact on the world. Learn about them now!

TWTR trading at $48.78.

The purpose of raising money on the market is to fund new initiatives, which is great. But those take time to come to fruition and become profitable. How long? Depends on how ambitious those plans are.

Another factor to consider is that the supply of shares on the open market will increase over the next year or two as people who hold stock get out of the lockup period, or employees see their shares vest. This can change the market in unpredictable ways.

Noah, I'd add improving the user experience to make it more accessible to new users (and improve retention rates of new users -- getting them to send that second tweet!) without upsetting existing users.

Now let's look at a couple that started steady, and went the other direction.