Twitter shares to be priced at $17-$20 US

Twitter has set a price range of $17 to $20 US per share for its much-anticipated initial public offering and says it could raise as much as $1.6 billion US in the process.

Twitter Inc. said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it is putting forth 70 million shares in the offering. If those are sold, the underwriters can buy another 10.5 million shares. At the $20 share price, Twitter's market value is around $12.5 billion.

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That's a relatively conservative number some analysts had expected that figure to be as high as $20 billion. The caution shows that Twitter learned from Facebook's rocky initial public offering last year.

Not surprisingly, Twitter's IPO will be much smaller than Facebook's, which was marred by technical glitches on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Those problems likely led Twitter to choose the New York Stock Exchange for its IPO.

The San Francisco-based short-messaging service plans to list its stock under the ticker symbol "TWTR" on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares will likely start trading in the next few weeks but the official date has yet to be announced.