Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams shared the stage today in a rare joint appearance where they addressed everything from criticism about its usefulness in activism to its impact on news to its overarching vision for the future.
Twitter’s co-founders participated in a lively fireside chat moderated by Businessweek’s Brad Stone at a sold-out event for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The conversation started with a discussion about whether Twitter has become mainstream. While Evan started by asking what “going mainstream” exactly meant, he did say that Twitter is getting more new user signups every week than the entire population of his home state of Nebraska. That’s 1.8 million users per week.
The conversation quickly moved into the rollout of the New Twitter. Both founders said that the reaction has been very positive. While VP of Product Jason Goldman was preparing the team for a backlash, it simply never occurred. The goal of the new design, Biz Stone said, was to keep Twitter’s inherent simplicity intact while adding the richness and the content people are linking to. Williams was the primary driver behind the new design.
The meat of the conversation really began when Brad Stone brought up a recent opinion piece in The New Yorker by best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell. In it, Gladwell argued that social media was essential when it came to serious activism. Biz Stone responded to the criticism first, stating that “some of it is right and some of it is wrong.” He agreed that tweeting doesn’t have the same impact as joining a physical protest where your life is at risk. However, he said it was “absurd” to not understand that Twitter and social media are complementary to that type of activism because of their ability to facilitate the fast exchange of information.
Williams followed up by saying that Twitter’s use in Iran was likely overstated, but it was an early sign of “what is possible and what wer’re trying to enable.” His next point was that the web and electronic networks are now a central point for organization of this type of activism, now that communities don’t all congregate in one place, such as the church, anymore.
Twitter, Advertising and New CEOs
Advertising was also a central focus of the fireside chat. Brad Stone asked the Twitter co-founders how they felt about the separation of advertising and editorial content and how they might be affecting that. Evan Williams immediately responded that Twitter clearly labels any tweets or trends that are advertisements. More importantly, he made clear that Twitter is a mix of advertisement and non-advertisement content. He cited brands such as Starbucks as examples of users voluntarily opting in for promotional tweets about a product because they asked for it. After all, Starbucks didn’t get more than 1 million followers without a lot of people expressing interest in their products.
At one point, Williams and Stone were asked whether they thought the commercialization of Twitter was “bittersweet.” Biz Stone responded that he believed the company was succeeding in balancing advertising and commercial content with Twitter’s content quite well. “I want to ask you to name another platform where you can send a message to 5 million people for free,” he told Brad Stone during the conversation. Yet if a company wanted to reach more people than their own followers, they had the opportunity to do so through Promoted Trends, Tweets or Accounts.
Of course, no Twitter interview this quarter would be complete without a discussion about Evan Williams stepping down as CEO of Twitter. There are plenty of product-oriented CEOs, and Brad Stone asked the Twitter co-founders why Williams didn’t choose to go that route instead. Williams responded that he chose roles at Twitter based on where he would be the most useful, and in fact, he was in his fourth role at Twitter.
Williams said he loved focusing on product the most, and he believed that the position of CEO of Twitter, due to is phenomenal growth, would require more attention on operational efficiency and personnel management than product strategy and direction, which is really what excited Williams more than other factors.
Twitter and a Billion Users
During the Q&A session, Biz Stone and Evan Williams were asked about their long-term vision for Twitter. Williams responded that they thought about Twitter in “broad strokes” and that they were focused on helping people find out what’s happening in the world and becoming an indispensable service for spreading and consuming information woldwide.
This led to another question: Do Twitter’s execs think the service could reach a billion users, something at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously claimed his company would reach after it surpassed the 500 million user mark. Williams affirmed his belief, saying, “Twitter will get to a billion members.” He quickly added it wouldn’t be the same billion individuals as Facebook, and he wouldn’t specify just how long it would take to reach that goal.
His comments likely refer to his team’s belief that Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally different services with fundamentally different goals. Tonight’s conversation was entirely about Twitter as an information network, something that Twitter likes to emphasize anytime they’re compared to Facebook. In the eyes of Twitter’s cofounders, they’ve built a tool that has changed how we consume news and information for the better.
There are a lot of people that would agree.
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