Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey steps down

Twitter executives Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams are switching places.

According to a post on the microblogging service's official blog, co-founder Williams will resume the helm of CEO from Dorsey, who will take over Williams' position as chairman of the board.

"We're entering a new phase now and there are new kinds of challenges ahead. Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times," Williams wrote in the blog post. "As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader."

Translation: It's time to get real.

Twitter execs Jack Dorsey, left, and Evan Williams are switching places. Williams will be the company's CEO and Dorsey will take over as chairman of the board.

(Credit: Twitter)

Twitter is growing fast, and closed a $15 million funding round in May. It weathered an engineering shake-up this spring and has managed to largely overcome its well-publicized server problems. Plus, Twitter has become a staple in tracking political zeitgeist--cable network Current TV displayed real-time "tweets" onscreen during the presidential debates.

But Twitter still remains Silicon Valley's poster child for hyped companies without revenue models. With the financial crisis continuing to unfold daily, that simply isn't acceptable.

We've heard whispers about Twitter's ideas for making money: that the company has thought about offering premium accounts for businesses that want to use it as a marketing tool, for example, or that its acquisition of search tool Summize may start to play into an advertising model.

But all this is tentative; the fact of the matter is, in this kind of economic climate, Twitter needs to shape up. Whether this was the result of investor pressure or a voluntary decision by Dorsey and Williams still isn't certain. At least on a superficial level, this makes sense. Williams was a more prominent "face" for the company anyway, whereas Dorsey tended to stay behind the scenes.

[andrew.mager]

I would like to be the CEO of Twitter.

[mrorie]

Andrew Mager wears headphones too often to be the CEO of Twitter. How would you hear your text message beeps? How, I ask you?

[JohnBarbagallo]

I hope Twitter finds a way to capitalize off of their users...I don't want to see them go under.

[trescrepu]

Going... going...

[ernieoporto]

I foresee teeny text ads between tweets that are contextually relevant. Sounds like territory Google will want to work in.

[jbshort]

Twitter really does need to shape up. I was using it for a couple of months, and frankly didn't see why it's been touted so highly. It seemed to me to be a pretty big time-waster. But I was hanging in there, until my account was suspended. No explanation, nothing. I contacted them via email and the answer I received was that my account was suspended because "USER IS flagged antisocial!" I had no idea what that meant, since I didn't think I did anything wrong, and have not heard back with an answer. My account was suspended on November 4th, and it's now November 12th. The investors in this company should know how the company is being run. Even if I am somehow reinstated, I think my Twittering days are over. Life is too short.

[icedtime]

We always twitt about our new product updates on icedtime.com. Twitter gets our message across.