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For months, tech writers have marveled at Twitter's quirky success. One-hundred and forty characters at a time, the company has brought in more than 2 million users, 2 million monthly page views, and $15 million in venture capital. Especially in the last few months, the microblogging, instant-messaging, social-networking platform has gone mainstream.

As Twitter has made the leap to the masses, a fundamental, quantitative question has started to percolate among technoscribes: How the hell is Twitter going to make money? Behind that query, though, is another that often goes unasked in today's Silicon Valley: Does Twitter even want to make money in the first place? Or is it all peer pressure?

Plenty of people have played armchair CFO and tried to graft a business model onto the service. The advice: Twitter should start using banner ads (as they already do in Japan), charge for pro accounts that guarantee uninterrupted service, insert text ads midfeed a la Facebook, and/or sell data to advertisers so they can narrowcast ads based on what you and friends are Tweeting about (a tactic that social networks employ). That's not all-the Twitterverse, blogosphere, and mainstream media have plenty of other pearls of wisdom to share.

Through all the noise, Twitter has made it clear that it's in no rush to start making money. Co-founder Evan Williams told TechCrunch last month that Twitter has "thought about" its revenue model, but that "it's not actively in development right now." Williams floats a few ideas about how to monetize, but they're sketchy. He suggested similarly murky ideas in 2007, but the company hasn't moved forward with its revenue model since then.

Twitter gets the revenue question so often, it devotes part of its press room FAQ to the monetization question:

Twitter has many appealing opportunities for generating revenue but we are holding off on implementation for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand which is to create a compelling service and great user experience for millions of people around the world.

The Big Money interviewed Biz Stone, another Twitter co-founder, who recently told Portfolio that focusing on a revenue stream would be "a distraction." We wanted to know whether this was all an act, whether Twitter was really just keeping plans close to the vest. So: How often do folks sit down to talk about a revenue model. Once a week? Once a month? It's never discussed, Stone said.

Why not? Because Twitter, according to Stone, still isn't "sustainable." Stone used the S-word as an excuse repeatedly during our chat, as if it were a safety blanket made out of chainmail. Twitter wants to have both a sustainable product and business plan before it starts to capitalize on its community. The product bit makes some sense-for months Twitter's service had been plagued with glitches. But Twitter's servers have been performing relatively well for the last few months, so maybe sustainability has been achieved.

Stone's other comment—that Twitter needed a sustainable business model—was more troublesome. Here, sustainability entails finding revenue without alienating current or future users, a common refrain among Web 2.0 folk. Facebook's ill-fated Beacon advertising platform failed while trying to find that balance. Williams told Download Squad, "Our top concern when it comes to monetization will be to do so in a way that does not negatively impact users." So instead of experimenting with a business model that might accomplish that goal, Twitter's founders continue to lounge within the comfortable status quo.

There may be a deeper, psychological reason that Twitter can't follow the dollar. It may have a Peter Pan complex-it just doesn't want to grow up. Pan ultimately chooses Never Never Land because he is worried about the pains adulthood will invite into his life. For now, Twitter is choosing to do the same.