Twitter Founder Ev Williams Outlines the Future
By Keir Whitaker @keirwhitaker
14 April 2010 | Category: Business
Editor's note: We are at the official Twitter Developer Conference "Chirp" today and will be writing up a few of the key sessions. If you would like to watch Chirp live head on over to http://chirp.twitter.com/live.html.
photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
Ev Williams, Twitter CEO and co-founder, keynoted the first official Twitter developer conference today at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. After presenting a historical look at Twitter's origins he identified four main priorities driving the future of the company.
Infrastructure
Building out a scalable infrastructure is top of the list. This includes working on how the service can technically scale, the quality of service it delivers (i.e. reducing 500 errors) and enabling the Twitter developers to have tools that enable rapid development.
Some examples include FlockDB (available on GitHub) a distributed graph database and another in house tool called “Murder”, a “killer tool for deployment”
Friction-Free
Ev identified that “Twitter is too hard”. He showed a screengrab showing that if you type “i don’t get” into Google “I don’t get Twitter” is the second result. One main goal of the Twitter is to make it “fast, obvious and easy”. Recent developments in this area include the new home page design and an improved sign up process.
There’s also a massive focus on “mobile”. Currently 37% of Twitter users use the service on their phones. They are working closely with 65 international carriers to improve SMS integration.
Recently Twitter launched an official app for the Blackberry and within 3 days of launch over 100,000 new users had signed up via that device. The recent acquisition of Atebits (makers of Tweetie) will bring an official Twitter iPhone app.
Relevance
Currently there are 55 million tweets per day and over 600 million searches a day. One of the main issues is to help users find relevant tweets. Recently “Top Tweets” launched and location services are now live and will be extended to include “places”. Location is seen as fundamental to “relevance” and enabling users to find information that’s important to them.
Ev also identified that information overload is a problem. They are working hard on ways to help Twitter users reduce the overload and enable ways to help users find relevant information.
Revenue
Simply stated “revenue is happening this year for Twitter”. Revenue will be “organic” and “user beneficial”. Ev didn’t give too much away on this, more announcements are expected.
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