Soon after Facebook filed its documents and made its intentions to go public known, people started speculating about when Twitter would take the plunge with their own offering. In a leaked email, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said that his company didn’t want to be public until they “have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” and added that Twitter wasn’t “ready to be a public company for a couple years.” These private comments echoed public comments Costolo has made about being patient in the way they build the business.

But is the time nearing for an IPO? One firm believes so. According to a report from Greencrest Capital, they believe that Twitter may being preparations to go public sometime in 2013 and the offering would come in 2014.

Greencrest uses recent managerial shifts to back up their claim, pointing to Ali Rowghani’s move from CFO to COO, and the addition of ex-Zynga guy Mike Gupta as CFO. Also, Newsvine’s Mike Davidson is now on board as VP of design.

Also, Twitter is undoubtedly better positioned to generate revenue than ever before as their promoted products offerings continue to expand.

Max Wolff, and analyst with Greencrest, now puts Twitter’s projected valuation at $11 billion. He says that Twitter’s valuation is up since the Facebook IPO.

He makes this valuation based on secondary market trading, but makes this caveat:

“Using the secondary market for shares to mark enterprise value is a very difficult and opaque process. It is a rumor rich and special share class soup.”

That being said, an $11 billion valuation is up a few billion from the last time we heard a valuation based on secondary markets back in July of 2011. And although $11 billion is barely 10% of the astronomical $100 billion figure we heard for Facebook when the IPO rumors began, Wolff says that Twitter’s valuation “looks better” than Facebook’s.

A few weeks ago, Twitter announced 200 million MAUs.

[via Forbes]