After turning down a $500 million buyout option from Facebook, it has now emerged that Twitter is in fact gaining revenue from non-other than Microsoft, with a new site launched recently called ExecTweets.com.

While the original flavour of Twitter.com, with 1.4 billion tweets and counting, still remains free, ExecTweets has sponsored advertising as well as an undisclosed figure of moolah coming straight from Ballmer and into Twitter’s ever moth-ridden back pocket.

ExecTweets takes recommended twitter accounts from high rolling business types and displays them in a collection that can be moderated by the public, a feature never before available in the 140-character realm.

Although a profit building exercise, if you are one for trying to keep on the down-low, even if you may be a moolah mongol yourself, you can still have your tweets removed from this site, with the ‘Remove Me’ information located in a nice, barely noticeable grey colour right at the bottom of all the tweets sent to @exectweets

Hopefully this will give the twitter developers a bit more room to improve a somewhat segmented service with such niceties as, oh, I don’t know, reply-context? So one doesn’t have to wade through post after post of @randoms to get to actual content from the user… *sigh* One can dream.