Column: All the news that didn't fit in Twitter's IPO tweet

The folks at Twitter, where every story can be told in 140 characters or less, must have known that the company’s IPO announcement would boil down to this: It’s going to be the biggest Internet IPO since Facebook.

Talk about damning with faint praise. The Facebook IPO was seen as a fiasco, at least until a couple of months ago when its stock price finally started creeping up above the $30 mark, where it was supposed to have started more than a year before.

It looks like Twitter is working to avoid that comparison.

In part, the company has done this with a series of strategic acquisitions that shore up its position as an advertising platform with a strong mobile audience, a social media company with a solid multimedia presence, and even a reliable source of breaking news.