According to Jessica E. Vascellaro at Wall Street Journal we could see the arrival of commercial (Pro) accounts in Twitterland at some point this year. The accounts would offer users more features in exchange for a fee but Twitter hasn’t set a date for them being implemented.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says the San Francisco start-up is watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year, but doesn’t view them as competition. "We want to work with those companies that are already making an effort," he says.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Ms. Vascellaro also says that Twitter will be getting a cut from one of the outside businesses that has sprung up to ride Twitter’s coattails. The first of these cut deals is ExecTweets which was launched by Federated Media, an online advertising network, and is sponsored by Microsoft. Federated Media has said that it plans to share some of the sponsorship revenue with Twitter.

[hat tip to Silicon Alley Insider]

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The company pulled in $5.37 billion — a number 39 percent higher than its second quarter in 2007. The vast majority — 66 percent — came from Google-owned sites. Another 31 percent came from AdSense-related income. Just over half of Google’s money came from outside the U.S.

Google says its operating expenses were $1.65 billion for the quarter — 31 percent of its total revenue. That’s down slightly from $1.53 billion this time last year.

Still, Google missed average earnings estimates by about 11 cents a share — the fourth time ever it has not exceeded analyst expectations. Google’s stocks dropped about 7 percent following the news.

Update: Numbers are also now out from Microsoft and IBM, if you’re interested.

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