Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took the stage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference late this afternoon and was greeted by that old chestnut: When is Twitter going to make some simoleons?

Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, who interviewed Stone (the pair are pictured here) posted a poll about that and a few other topics (the audience preferred Facebook to Twitter by about three to one, for example), and then asked a question he said was on the minds of many in Silicon Valley:

“Why the hell aren’t you guys making money?”

“I think that’s a legitimate concern,” said Stone. “We need to focus on value before we focus on profit.”

But, he added that the San Francisco-based Twitter was ready to show some commitment to revenue this year.

Oh dear, what will BoomTown have to gripe about at Twitter now?

Because–aside from the lack of a business model–I must confess I like Twitter an awful lot and find it extremely useful!

Earlier, Stone made the salient point that Twitter was just in the first innings.

“We have a lot of growing to do,” he said. “In general, we feel we are about one percent into the growing of Twitter.”

One more important issue than money-making, he noted correctly, was that the level of engagement at Twitter is not as high as the level of awareness.

“We just have to position our product better,” said Stone.

Of course, Lashinsky had to ask about the recently stolen documents that a hacker nabbed from some Twitter employees’ personal accounts.

Stone said that there are “unpolished notes,” which only “give you an idea of scope we are thinking of…the idea is that we are thinking big.”

Lashinsky asked if Twitter would sue either TechCrunch, which published some of the stolen documents, or the hacker who stole them.

(My first thought: Let’s all pray that TechCrunch will avoid touting that navel-gazing nonstory into the weekend.)

“I don’t know,” said Stone diplomatically, since TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was sitting right in the room. “In general, we have a responsibility to look into these things and see what makes sense.”

Then, it was pretty much back to business models, and Stone seemed open to a lot of them, as long as they were not forced on the innovative digital darling.

“We want to develop a revenue model that is baked-in…and is not something that is tacked on,” he said.

Some ideas: Advertising, of course, as well as commercial accounts and verifying brands.

“We spent a lot of 2008 trying to get ahead technically of the unexpected popularity,” said Stone. “The very, very high level [of what Twitter needs to be doing] is to add more value to users.”

That means more focus on adding new features, such as a reputation system, better discovery and more explanation–for David Letterman, for example–of exactly how Twitter can be used.

And yes, making money. Stone noted that Twitter wanted to change the world too, and the best way to do that was to make “tons of money.”

“What we don’t want is to become that child actor that grew up all freaky,” he said, noting a Ron Howard development cycle was Twitter’s goal.

All hail Opie Twitter, oops, Taylor!

[Photo credit: Brad Markel for Fortune]

It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner (TWX) online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

The event, which is taking place over three days in Pasadena, Calif., is packed full of Web and media luminaries, so BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, such as this one that I did for the session with Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS).

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

“We are still in a very large trade wind,” he said, referring to advertisers spending money online. “If someone asked you if advertising [online] is going to go up, I think you would have to say yes.”

To take advantage of that, Armstrong said AOL would be focused on investing “in content systems that connect with advertising systems–that’s a white space we are going after.”

He noted that AOL needs to have the same “plumbing approach” to content that Google (GOOG)–where Armstrong had been a major advertising exec before taking his new job–has had to search advertising.

“You have to take the Silicon Valley approach to content,” Armstrong declared.

Armstrong also talked a little bit about his recent 100-day trip around the AOL empire worldwide and what he got out of it.

“I got a lot of advice from different people about what to do,” he said.

His takeaway, which he will discuss at an all-hands meeting scheduled for tomorrow with AOL staff: “It’s really about strategy. If we don’t have the right strategy, we’re not going to win.”

Which is kind of stating the obvious, but it sounded good.

Armstrong also touched lightly on the issue of getting rid of various assets AOL has compiled over the last several years, like it pricey purchase of the Bebo social networking site.

But some, as I recently reported–such as the Truveo video search service and the information search company Relegence–are staying.

Armstrong also talked of buying, but judiciously–noting to me later that AOL had 900 possible acquisition deals blocked in its pipeline.

Someone call a plumber stat!

Armstrong said he has put a stop to a lot of those deals, including putting the kibosh on a $400 million check he was supposed to sign right when he got there.

It was, as he told me after his interview, a windfall that supposed to go to a big computer maker for a distribution deal, which he chose to pass on.

“Everything has to make sense from a return-on-investment basis for me,” said Armstrong. “It’s that easy.”

And that hard, although he did move the crowd, which was polled with the same questions about AOL’s chances after Armstrong talked.

He got more people in the audience to vote that AOL would “return to health as a major Internet player,” which is–as legions of the company’s leaders have shown–no easy task.

[Photo credit: Brad Markel for Fortune]

Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS), was the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

But let’s set the scene: Iger looks like a very typical old-media mogul you might order from an online catalog–handsome, suave and sophisticated, a perfect mix of Hollywood and New York.

Thank goodness, then, that he never seems to have acquired that other irksome characteristic of some of his peers–a full-bored panic over the Internet.

In fact, Iger–whom I also interviewed onstage at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006–has been unusually fast-forward among many of the big media companies in facing the digital music and dancing.

Fortune writer Richard Siklos asked him about a mishmash of subjects, from subscription services to authentication to cable providers, all of which center around a basic question:

How the heck is Disney going to be paid for its wares–because someday those agelessly lucrative “kids” from “High School Musical” are not going to agree to yet another reunion?

“This is the beginning of the beginning,” said Iger, who noted that it would be folly to guess what’s coming next in the digital arena.

A most excellent point that he made several times, adding that it was important for companies like Disney to keep trying out all sorts of things digitally, until they got it right.

“This notion of protecting the present is something that I talk a lot about [with employees],” said Iger, who wants them not to do that so much.

He noted that running a modern media company meant you had to have “one hand in the present and one hand in the future.”

Iger forgot about the hand that you might need to protect yourself from partners of the present–like big-box retailers, television affiliates, cable networks–who are going to come at you with a cudgel for giving the stuff you sell them away free on, say, Hulu.

Hulu, of course, is the popular, tiny-money-making premium online video service, which is a joint partnership of News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and now Disney.

“We believe in Hulu,” said Iger, who thinks its business model–currently just online advertising–might evolve over time.

But, he added, he was “somewhat skeptical” of any one answer to what is ahead.

As in: Iger just does not know, which is probably the best thing a media mogul can say right now.

Except for one thing he said is always mindful of–to follow, “where the consumer is going.”

Consumers are going online, of course, which is certainly going to require all-hands-on-deck at Disney in the years ahead.

[Update: It seems Disney was keeping its hand in the present for today, as it apparently had YouTube take down a trailer for its new "Alice in Wonderland" movie, which was set to debut at Comic-Con International in San Diego tomorrow.]

Yahoo plans on announcing Thursday that it has bought Xoopit for a price in the $20 million range, according to several sources, one of its first acquisitions in a long while.

Reached late this afternoon by BoomTown, a Yahoo (YHOO) spokeswoman declined to comment about the acquisition. Xoopit did not respond to emails earlier today.

But sources said it was a done deal to buy the San Francisco-based social email start-up that finds photos, video, links and other files in email so that users can surface and then share them on many sites. It also has other products that essentially enliven email.

Xoopit’s investors–Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, along with several angel investors–have pumped about $6.5 million into the company since 2006.

According to sources, Yahoo was first impressed with its innovative plug-in that works with Gmail from Google (GOOG), and has been looking at the company for a while, previously offering about $10 million for it.

Xoopit also makes a similar photo-sharing application for Yahoo! Mail, which it launched late last year.

The opening up of its popular email product to a variety of third-party applications, in order to make it more robust, has been a goal of Yahoo recently, as it seeks to socialize one of its most popular products.

One source said Xoopit was a good fit for Yahoo because it allowed the company’s email to be the platform that could knit together other social networking services, such as Facebook. This is seen as a core feature, although the Silicon Valley-based company is also opening its email products up to outside developers.

Yahoo has been planning on announcing the acquisition on Thursday at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, where SVP of Applications Products Bryan Lamkin is appearing on a panel titled, “Dollars & Demographics: Capitalizing on Demographic Trends.”

Lamkin, a former Adobe Systems (ADBE) exec, now runs the Yahoo unit that includes email and other communications and communities products. He was hired in April by CEO Carol Bartz.

That panel topic is a little ironic, several sources joked, since Xoopit is not profitable and has very small revenues thus far.

The Wall Street Journal also reported on the deal, although it said Yahoo and Xoopit were still in late-stage talks and the deal was not complete yet.

But, according to my sources, it is done.

In BoomTown’s ongoing quest to overdose on tech conferences, I traveled south of San Francisco last night for Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm: TECH conference.

Run by David Kirkpatrick, it’s well done and a great place to run into a range of techies from Silicon Valley, as well as talk to more creative thinkers on where tech is going.

I was there to be on a dinner panel with fellow bloggers Om Malik of GigaOm and my favorite geek to tease, Robert Scoble, of Scobleizer. Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky moderated.

It was an interesting panel about a range of topics, from Yahoo (YHOO)–Kevin Kelly was bored, bored, bored with that topic–to the looming economic pressure that the digital industry is about to experience (a bummer, but entirely true).

Here’s the video: