Twitter's IPO To Be As Painless As Possible? Maybe Not for Users

Going public might be quick and painless for Twitter, but users should expect changes to the social media network.

Late on Thursday, Twitter announced (on Twitter, of course) that it had filed the paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

We've confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.

— Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013

But according to an anonymous source "who was briefed on the process," speaking to Quartz, the filing actually happened a few weeks ago (If you look at the wording of the tweet, Twitter says that it has submitted the paperwork, but never mentions when). The SEC is believed to have already completed most of their review.

That fact, along with the fact that Twitter filed the paperwork through the confidential "secret IPO" process, clearly indicates that Twitter wants to avoid as much of the overblown hype and Wall Street antics, the kind that accompanied another social media company's IPO. When Facebook opened up to shareholders about a year ago, a public revision, out of control expectations and speculation, and, finally, a glitch in the NASDAQ on its first day of trading led to quite a debacle.

All expectations for Twitter is that, now that it has announced its IPO filing, the company will move with all deliberate speed to move through all of the processes required for a company going public. By law, Twitter has to wait a minimum of three weeks after the S-1 IPO paperwork is filed before completing a so-called "road show," where big investors get a chance to take a look at the company's offerings. After that, Twitter's shares get priced and the IPO is all cleared and ready to go.

Lots of companies take months or even years going through this process before their IPO, but Twitter isn't expected to take any more time than it needs to. As Quart's Zach Seward put it, "Twitter's strategy is to rip the bandage off as fast as possible."

But even if the IPO isn't a fiasco, Twitter going public could only be the beginning of a pain for third-party developers, not to mention users. That's because, obviously, after going public, Twitter owes its share-holders the best return for their investment it can provide.

For the past several years, it's been a bit of a miracle that Twitter stayed afloat. A year ago, when Gawker got its hands on Twitter's private financials for 2010-2011, it was clear that Twitter was hemorrhaging money - a net loss of $67.8 million in 2010 and a net loss of $25.8 million in 2011, according to the leaked documents.

Since then, Twitter has amped up the corporate partnerships and advertising, but for the many users who use TweetDeck, or a third-party Twitter client, they never see the ads or sponsored tweets.

That's great for power users, who get a higher signal-to-noise ratio in their feeds - thus making it a great tool for professionals. But that's a terrible thing if you're an investor, and Twitter has to know that.

So expect Twitter to enter the age of advertising, which means sponsored posts and other revenue-generating schemes may make their way into TweetDeck first, which is owned by Twitter. And third-party apps like HootSuite and Tweetbot might start to get squeezed in an effort to generate revenue from them as well. Or Twitter might just stop giving them free client access to its API.

Or Twitter might just cut off third-party clients entirely because, for example, no one ever asks, "What's your favorite Facebook client?" - but Facebook is doing well on Wall Street.

So savor the ad-free Twitter environment while you can, because that is almost certainly going to change - and with Twitter going full-speed-ahead towards its IPO, it will change sooner than you think.