While pundits write Twitter's eulogy, the social network keeps succeeding -- and making itself valuable to marketers -- by releasing new features, fixing mistakes, and moving forward.

Twitter is putting its revenue-generating strategy in place, implementing features that marketers and advertisers will pay to use to connect with customers. It's implementing the strategy slowly -- it's in no rush. It makes mistakes, and then it learns from the mistakes and goes back and tries again.

The latest iteration: Promoted Tweets. As explained on the Twitter blog, Promoted Tweets are messages from brands and organizations that appear at the top of a Twitter user's timeline -- but only if that user is already following the brand. That last bit is important, seeing to it that the ads are only going to users who already invited them.

Promoted Tweets are in most ways like regular Tweets, but with greater visibility. In the first phase, they'll only appear on the Twitter Website, not in apps, which are a major channel for consuming Twitter. But expect that to change as the service rolls out.

Twitter is testing Promoted Tweets with partners including Best Western, Dell, Gatorade, JetBlue, Starbucks, Virgin America, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the American Red Cross, and more.

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