The founders talk candidly on where they've been & where they're going
I recently visited the Twitter team in its South Park offices in San Francisco, where all 17 members—including the three founders-- sit in a single room at one long table. I got to interview each of them while another senior colleague unloaded a Costco shipment nearby.
Of all the emerging tools of social media, Twitter is the most conversational. The mobile SMS service lets people chat in compact 140-character spoonfuls. Some use it 20-30 times or more per day and have thousands of followers. But the average user only posts three times a day and chats only with a few friends.
I spoke mostly with Biz Stone, who I got to know in Spain last year. Biz talks about how the team started as an entirely different company and discovered the power of Twitter in serendipity fashion, but was smart enough to change course abruptly.
Biz made clear that Twitter’s main focus is making the product more reliable and more robust before the company turns to any revenue producing.
We discussed briefly that businesses are starting to find ways to use Twitter. He talked about Jet Blue. But in our 20 minute chat, we never got to others that include Seesmic, who launched exclusively on Twitter, as well as H&R Block, the tax people who have used it so successfully, or the Dell Outlet program that lets Twitter users get early discounts on close outs.
Teaser: GNTV’s Shel Israel talks with Twitter founders about how the company got started, who uses the popular service and how. They examine business models and how business is starting to use the mobile SMS service.
