Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 3, 2008 – 11:59 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
A photo of the Twitter offices when we visited it in September 2007.
Evan Williams co-founder and CEO of Twitter spoke at a Churchill Club event in San Francisco on Tuesday and generated a few pretty juicy quotes. Check it out:
On Revenue:
“We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because…we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.”
On raising money:
“We’re looking at Q1 for revenues. The original plan was to focus on revenues in 2010. That’s no longer the case, since I don’t want to raise money in 2009.”
On scale and Google:
“We want revenues to be product-based. Google built something that can really scale, and that’s our intention as well.”
On ambition:
“I worked on Blogger for six years, and I don’t think that’s as big as Twitter. Twitter will dwarf that.”
On competition:
“I’m pretty sure they are (planning to), but we can’t worry about that. Focus is a really big deal. Even Google stumbles on the focus issue. It’s not as important as search and advertising. Innovator’s dilemma works against bigger companies.”
On Twitter for newbies:
“It’s amazing anyone uses Twitter today. It’s hard.”
Twitter has grown big by keeping Twitter simple and being extremely careful when it comes to introducing new features. But Evan promises some pretty drastic changes in 2009 with support for Groups and sub-networks. This is one of the most requested features and should make Twitter more attractive to business users too. And that might just be where a revenue model comes in.
Read the whole article on CNET with more in depth analysis by Rafe Needleman who was actually present at the Churchill Club event and selected these quotes.
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Written on November 3, 2008 – 1:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Twitter can be useful for almost anything. Leaking great tech stories, asking your geeky fiancée to marry you, staying in touch with your voters, or finding the right person for the job… Well, for almost all of these purposes expect the latter.
Biz Stone and Evan Williams are looking for a “Founder Associate”, or, as most people call it, a secretary. Yet this guy or gal has to be ambitious, more specifically, “the ideal candidate is a future entrepreneur or executive who is willing to work hard and do a wide variety of non-glamorous tasks for a year or two in order to get their foot in the door, learn, and make connections.”
You might think this job vacancy would be the perfect opportunity for an interesting Twitter experiment. A first round of job applications of only 140 characters. But no, instead of that, Evan and Biz post a regular announcement on Jobscore. Williams does mention it on his Twitter page, but more like he doesn’t expect his future assistant to be active on the service yet:
In fact, he or she might be. A Twitter Search for “Founder Associate” gives some interesting examples.
Oh well, maybe next time. This little post at least proves that something like a vacancy buzz does exist on Twitter. Why not benefit from that?
Written on September 11, 2008 – 9:04 pm
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
Twitter founder Evan Williams tweetpoints (I totally coined that term!) to a job listing for the company on Craigslist, which shows at least one direction Twitter is turning in the infamous search for a business model. The position offered is one for a ‘Partner Relations Coordinator’, and these are the tidbits that reveal a little more about where it’s heading:
“Each month, Twitter gets contacted by hundreds of businesses, consumer brands, events, celebrities, non-profits, agencies and other organizations who want to use Twitter in various ways. The goal of the Partner Relations Coordinator is to work with these entities, while maximizing our relationships and opportunities with current/future partners to grow the Twitter community worldwide.”
You could say that this is partly a customer service role, and that would be true. But this also shows Twitter is looking for more ways to engage with partners and help them use Twitter. I’m sure that eventually, the company will start charging for some of these services.
I realize I’m stating some obvious things here and that there’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff to be found, but it’s interesting to see them starting to think about what to do with the microsharing service now that it has quite some adoption and momentum going for it.
Two of the roles for the new hire will be:
Identify strategic new potential partners in key verticals, including live events/festivals, music (and others TBD) to onboard them to Twitter.
Implement partner programs and processes, including managing database and tracking effectiveness of resulting partner campaigns.
Partners? Verticals? Databases? Tracking effectiveness? Campaigns?
Sure smells like marketing to me. :)
Written on December 11, 2007 – 12:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Evan Williams, creator of Twitter, asked an interesting question:
What can we take away, to create something new?
Williams thinks that adding constraints to your service can help your users. “The more options you offer, the less often people will use it. If you look at Twitter for example, it’s a blogging app without tools as commenting and images. And of course, there is the post limit of 140 characters.”
When Twitter launched, people started building applications right away. Williams gives us two reasons for this: “Firstly, it’s text only and so integrates with almost everything. Secondly, developers wanted to make up for the lack of features. Some Twitter users even say that if services as Twitteriffic didn’t exist, they wouldn’t use Twitter at all.”
Some other examples of services that had success by leaving something out:
- Fotolog allows its users to post only one photo a day. It had a positive effect on the amount of comments. Now, the average number of comments on a single photo is eleven. Moreover, it lowered their costs.
- When Facebook started, it limited the people who could join: just college kids. They opened up later.
- A very successful dating site only shows their users a photo with ‘yes’ or ‘no’ buttons.
- When Google wanted to compete with Yahoo, they removed all of Yahoo’s functions, expect for the blank text field and a search button.
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