Except advertising was invented so someone could foot the bill for good content consumed by consumers. When my assistant received a check for $25 from All Advantage for one week of viewing, I knew then that they were indeed on to something - just not the thing they thought they were. They were on to how to bankrupt a company in the shortest period of time. And they did that successfully.

My account-services director had relocated to San Francisco for the head-of-marketing job. He called me and said, “This place is amazing. We have a new building on the 101, and we’re hiring 700 people.”

Seven hundred people! I asked him to explain how the company was going to make money. And I still couldn’t understand. Less than 8 months later, he called to say they were shutting it down, and he was moving back to New York.

I feel like I'm having deja vu all over again. When venture execs start making statements like, “We’re not concerned about revenue,” you know that we’re going off the rails on a crazy train. The Internet is about innovation -- creating new business models or accelerating old ones -- but inherent in innovation is something called a business model. And inherent in creating a business model is something called revenue.

There are businesses that are before their time in generating revenue. YouTube (GOOG) is one. It will ultimately succeed and luckily it’s owned by one of, if not the deepest-pocketed company in the world.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m a friend of the Twitter trend. I have Tweetdeck, and my team Twitters, but, as I said at the outset, I must be a twit, because I’m missing how this company will ever live up to the hype.

Times like these are the breeding grounds for innovation. The Great Depression was the catalyst for growth and innovation, with companies like Disney (DIS), IBM (IBM) and United Technologies (UTX) emerging as leaders on the backside of the economic disaster. But these companies had 2 key elements: revenue and a business model.

Plato said, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” With Twitter, I’m seeing the invention - but I’m missing the necessity.