Twitter filed its S-1 on October 3rd, 2013 in its quest to raise up to $1 billion in a public offering. The company reports up to a quarter billion users and also a quarter billion in revenue for the first six months of 2013. While revenue doubled this year over last, its net loss grew by 40% to $69 million as a result of ballooning expenses.

In its story covering Twitter’s IPO plan, The Wall Street Journal asked Altimeter analyst and noted business author Brian Solis about his thoughts on challenges still facing the fledgling network. Among many things Solis observed Twitter’s biggest hurdle is something that comes back to the beginning, “They certainly have a lot of work ahead of them to get mainstream America to understand how Twitter works.”

Solis believes that Twitter Twitter is an information network…a pulse of society that’s public, searchable, steerable. For years he’s referred to it as a human seismograph. He also believes that Twitter is becoming a holding company for multiple business lines including data, music, TV, news/events, et al. The company is creating a new platform for marketing…based around true storytelling and engagement. It, at only 200+ million users, has managed to transform media and the way we consume, share…and now create it. But make no mistake investors and reporters, Solis cautions investors to think beyond MySpace and Facebook. “Twitter is not a social network,” he asserts. “it’s more important than that.” The question he asks is whether Twitter can convey that to Wall St. and Main St.