SS: Has Twitter evolved in the way you anticipated it would when you dreamed the idea up?
BS: Certainly it grew a lot faster and bigger than ever anticipated. When we first dreamt it up, we wondered if it was potentially too conceptual. We thought we had something on our hands but we really needed to see it in action. So that’s a hard question to answer; certainly we had big dreams but already they’ve been surpassed.
SS: Each tweet has to be no more than 140 characters. Why?
BS: The International limit of text messages is 160, but we needed to reserve a little bit of space for the name of the person the message is coming from. The idea is that we want these messages to be able to work across all
mediums whether you’re on the web; you’re using mobile texting, or SMS.
SS: It seems Twitter is being used by many corporates as a marketing tool, a sales tool. Are you worried the spirit of Twitter has been lost?
BS: What we’ve discovered is that the spirit of Twitter is much bigger than we had originally intended. I think what we really found was a much greater spirit. The fact is that businesses from small local high shops all the way up to big companies that own airlines are all using Twitter everyday as part of the way that they do business.
SS: Let’s talk money. Twitter has never made money, is that right?
BS: Well, it’s essentially correct. At this point we are not making any kind of meaningful revenue; that’s because we’ve made a conscious decision to focus instead on building value. At this point our company, which is about 2 years old, is growing the network and growing the system worldwide so that it’s meaningful and relevant. Making sure that more features are added and that it becomes something that is essential to people every day. And once we get to that point with our service, then it makes a lot of sense for us to take some of our resources and focus them on revenue generation so that we can become a profitable, sustainable, independent company.
SS: But how do you do that Biz? How do you, to use the terrible word, monetize - what you’ve established with Twitter?
BS: It’s funny; I recently saw an article from 2000 talking about how Google doesn’t make any money and what a shame it is. And of course Google has proven that article very wrong! We look to companies like Google, who have taken a similar path, as kind of a role model, a way that makes sense for both users and businesses. Some of the ways we’re looking at that initially are just simple tools and services we could add to Twitter to make it more relevant for what people are already using it for.
SS: Such as? Give me a specific.
BS: Well there are companies right now like Starbucks using Twitter to actually sell. There’s a pie company in San Francisco that sends out a tweet everyday saying what the fresh pie of the day is and this is leading to a lot more people coming into their shop and buying pies. I think what we can do is ask them a few questions. We can say to them, as well to Starbucks, what services make sense for you? We’re still working that out, but it seems there are ways that we could offer services to enhance what’s already happening and extract a fee for those services.
SS: Rumour has it that you are already getting feelers from Google and that you may be on the point of selling out to Google, are you?
BS: I don’t like to comment on rumours but what I do like to reaffirm is that we very much believe that Twitter can be a successful, independent, profitable company and we’re working towards that goal more than anything else.
SS: Can you tell me whether you are actively thinking about selling out to, for example Google, and would you do it by the end of this year?
BS: Well, like I say what we’re really actually thinking about is remaining independent and building our business. That being said we’re always talking to other companies. We’re always engaged in conversations and there’s of course, certain sort of fiduciary responsibilities we have to engage in. But again I would reiterate that our goal here is to build a profitable, independent company.
SS: What do you say to those who allege that Twitter in the end is sucking up a whole lot of people’s time and actually not really offering them very much at all?
BS: Well, I would ask them to pull back and look at the bigger picture. Stop looking at one word or one sentence in a book and read the whole book. Understand that what we have here is a new form of communication that people all around the world, including people in developing nations, are using to connect and to share information in real time across devices as simple as SMS.
SS: But the thing about Twitter is that it is so reductive; it is by and large banal.
BS: I wouldn’t agree. I think you can look at the content of an individual tweet - such as the one this photo journalism student made just after he was arrested in Egypt. He just sent out one word and the word was ‘arrested’ and because he had people following his account back in the United States they understood. They contacted the school and contacted a lawyer and the lawyer contacted the consulate and they got him out of that prison. So it’s different from these other services that you mentioned because it is happening in real time and it’s happening in a one-to-many way.
SS: Where do you see Twitter in a year from now?
BS: I think we have a lot of work to do. We’ve discovered this is a new kind of communication that people find very valuable and relevant and I think we need to work very hard to communicate that ourselves and to bring it
to more places around the world. Right now London is our top city, but there are many, many places around the world that we think Twitter can have a serious impact on, specially places that are using texting a lot, such as
India and other developing areas.
SS: How often do you tweet per day?
BS: I say I tweet about two or three times a day which I’ve always sort of done. It kind of matches how many times I eat for whatever reason.
SS: What about?
BS: Well that depends. If I’m travelling it’s a little bit more interesting to tweet so I’ll tweet more often because I’m in different surroundings and everything’s new to me. On a day to day basis often I’ll tweet about events happening here at Twitter because I feel that that may be of interest to people. But other times I sort of say what’s on my mind, I share a link or a photo or something that I think is interesting. I really don’t think to hard about it. I like to keep that low cognitive load and keep it light and easy.
SS: A final thought from somebody who sent a tweet into our office when we said we were going to talk to you: Do you Biz ever feel sorry or guilty for all the wasted time that you are responsible for? What’s your answer?
BS: Well it’s funny because I look at it in exactly the opposite way. One of the things that I think is beautiful about Twitter is this idea that unlike other forms of traditional electronic communications, such as email, which forces you to respond and builds up, you can walk away from Twitter. You can unfollow an account, you can just decide that you are not going to be connected for a few days, and then you can come back and here it is, waiting for you again.
SS: Biz Stone, thank you for being on HARDTALK.