Despite its rapid growth, Twitter has yet to make any money. Or even earn any revenue.
And Evan Williams, co-founder and chief executive of the microblogging service, is totally fine with that.
Mr. Williams founded several companies before Twitter, including the Blogger service that he eventually sold to Google. One lesson he has taken from them all: “Create something that you want to see in the world,” not what some M.B.A. brandishing a business plan suggests.
“I am motivated by the world telling me I am going to fail,” Mr. Williams told hundreds of journalists gathered in San Francisco for the Online News Association’s annual conference. (You can follow all the tweets about the conference with this tool .)
Even after snagging $100 million in new funding from investors, Mr. Williams seems to feel no pressure to come up with a revenue model for his popular service.
He said the company is instead focusing on building value, such as through the new Twitter Lists, which will allow anyone to create a custom list of Twitter accounts that can be shared publicly or privately. For example, you could compile your 10 favorite Twitterers on the topic of chocolate into an All About Chocolate List that anyone could browse.
It’s a potentially powerful tool that could empower a new class of Twitter curators that will guide others to the best content on Twitter, and Mr. Williams encouraged journalists — already in the business of curating and editing content — to jump into the fray.
While lists are one step towards taming the chaos of Twitter, a robust search tool is even more important.
In an interview after his keynote presentation, he acknowledged that the current Twitter search engine is too basic and the company has a “significant search team” working on improving it.
The next goal, he said, is to eliminate the duplicates and other “noise” that come up in most search queries.
Mr. Williams said the company is also releasing a tool for developers Friday that will allow geographic locations to be embedded in tweets.
Source:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/twitter-seeks-to-build-value-not-revenue/?ref=technology
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