NEW YORK--Twitter executive Jack Dorsey says he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company he co-founded.
"I think Twitter's a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity," said Dorsey, who was on a "Future of Media" panel here Wednesday as part of Internet Week New York. "It fades into the background, something that's just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device. So, e-mail, SMS, phone. That's where we want to be."
From Jack Dorsey's Twitter feed.
(Credit: Twitter)For those who stepped in late, Twitter blew up from a cult following of geeks and news junkies into a full-out phenomenon earlier this year, when actor Ashton Kutcher kicked off a challenge with CNN to be the first account to hit one million followers and Oprah Winfrey gave Twitter her seal of approval on the air.
But Dorsey, who served as the company's CEO until he stepped down last October (retaining his chairman post), did say he isn't tired of people asking him what Twitter's business model will ultimately be--a persistent nag among pundits who are skeptical of how fast it's risen without a clear way of making money. He said that the reason why Twitter hasn't come up with a business model yet is because the company needed to let users and developers shape it first.
"I like that question because it speaks to how Twitter came to be," Dorsey said. Many features of Twitter were "behavior(s) that we did not invent. That was usage that we saw, that we made easier. The hash tags that you're seeing today, same thing. The search engine was something that was outside the company."
It's sort of a Catch-22, if Dorsey is to be believed: Had Twitter rushed in with a moneymaking strategy early on, it could have hampered the company's growth. "We took VC money so that we can be patient in that endeavor, and we're going to be patient, we're going to do it right," he insisted. "We're not going to put something on top of it that doesn't fit."
Another sign that Twitter is finally growing up: The company has put out a job posting hunting for a product manager to help it start raking in revenue. The San Francisco start-up, flush with venture funding and media hype, has yet to make a cent.
"As Twitter's first product manager focused on revenue generation, you will play a defining role in the formulation of Twitter's business," the job description reads.
Gee! You don't say?
Twitter CEO Evan Williams has hinted that the future of Twitter lies in some sort of corporate accounts. And indeed, the job posting says the gig involves the creation of "products and feature sets of commercial-oriented Twitter applications."
But it also asks for "strong familiarity with online advertising and marketing models," which means that Twitter advertisements may not be off the blocks.
SAN FRANCISCO--In a panel at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams wouldn't concretely answer one of Silicon Valley's biggest unanswered questions: how the company plans to make money.
But he gave some strong indications. Hint: it's not advertising.
He spoke obliquely of a possible business model that we've heard whispers about before, corporate accounts for businesses that want to use Twitter. Twitter is a communication channel, he said, and what it can do is "charge the people who want to use that communication channel commercially."
He named companies like fire-sale start-up Woot.com that are already using Twitter to sell products: "a lot of companies that have goods that are scarce and they want to get the word out quickly." Other companies, like retailer Zappos.com, whose CEO Tony Hsieh spoke at the Web 2.0 summit on Wednesday, are using Twitter for internal communication and customer service.
"There is commercial value, not just personal value" to Twitter, Williams said, "and if there's commercial value we can really deliver on...then I don't think it's going to be hard to monetize that."
There are a lot of possibilities for "commercial" accounts, as Williams put it. Twitter could give corporations access to analytics and data unavailable in free Twitter accounts, something that could undoubtedly be enhanced by its acquisition of search app Summize earlier this year. Alternately, it could offer companies a way to use Twitter as an internal communication tool, something that start-ups like Yammer and Presently are trying to do.
Twitter had just completed a big partnership: its election night and debate deal with cable network Current, whose CEO Joel Hyatt joined Williams onstage for the panel.
Williams also exhibited what seemed to be a clear aversion to bringing advertising to Twitter, reinforcing the possibility that the company will institute enterprise accounts instead. "I think advertising, as most people think of it, is more and more a different proposition, the whole idea (that) we're going to insert some message along with the content you actually want, and hope you'll be interested in that as well."
In either case, what Twitter has to do soon is actually put some of this into action. The company raised its most recent venture round this spring, a $15 million round led by Spark Capital. Williams recently took over the CEO reins from fellow co-founder Jack Dorsey. And the company overcame a major hurdle in getting through election night without taking a technical tumble.
With these growing pains behind it and some money in the bank, inching toward profitability is a natural next step for Twitter. The clock is ticking, and industry confidence may start to waver before Twitter puts a business model in place. Some critics have alleged that it's getting late already, especially given an economic climate that has shortened the shelf life of companies running without revenues.
The panel moderator, author and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, asked Williams what scares him, what keeps him awake in the middle of the night.
"Thankfully I'm not waking up in the middle of the night as much lately," Williams joked, an allusion to the rocky state the company's infrastructure was in not so long ago. "But it's still very early for Twitter, and we get a lot of attention for the stage we're at as a company...We are not at the level of a Facebook or MySpace, and well established and mainstream yet, so it's all about execution now and there's a million worries on a daily basis about a particular feature, a part technical problem and people problems and everything else."
Regardless, he said, he's optimistic about Twitter's future. "I'm feeling pretty good right now," Williams said confidently. "There's not one worry that's overshadowing all the others."
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