Twitter CEO Evan Williams
By Nicole Powers
Mar 4, 2009
Evan Williams describes himself as "an American entrepreneur, originally a farm boy from Nebraska, who's been very lucky in business and life." This statement might be true if he was merely responsible for one giant leap in the Web 2.0 world. However, as someone partly responsible for two monumental jumps forward, one has to conclude that he's being over-modest by attributing his success to luck rather than his capacity for vision, tenacity and good judgment.
In 1999, Pyra Labs, a company Williams co-founded, launched Blogger, a web-based service that put easy to use blog publishing tools in the hands of the masses and helped fuel the proliferation of the web log phenomenon. The company was sold to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2003. Williams however had caught the start-up bug, and left Google the following year to co-found Odeo.com, an aggregator and search engine for podcasts. The Odeo concept never really took off, but a side project started at the company did. The original five-character SMS shortcode-friendly name for that venture was Twttr.
Odeo was reorganized and re-branded as Obvious Corp. in 2006, and Twitter, which had added a couple of vowels to its name, became the center of attention. After winning SXSW's Web Award in March 2007, Twitter was spun off as an entity unto itself. Since then, Twitter has grown exponentially, with usership increasing by 900% this past year. The site has leapt over giants like LiveJournal and Linkedin in terms of monthly visits, rising from #22 (in Jan '08) to #3 (in Jan '09) in Compete.com's list of the Top 25 Social Networks.
Unlike other, increasingly cumbersome, social networking sites, Twitter's success lies in its simplicity. It has stayed true to its original concept: delivering brief Facebook style status updates to social groups in real-time via SMS. The service, which can also be accessed via RSS and the web, combats our propensity for digital diarrhea (which was, ironically, enabled by the likes of Blogger), by asking one simple question and limiting posts in response to 140 cellphone-friendly characters.
We tracked down Evan Williams (Twitter's CEO as of October 2008) -- via Twitter of course -- to ask him about the rules he tweets by, the people he follows, and his vision for the service's future.
Nicole Powers: Twitter has progressed way beyond the "What are you doing?" concept and has become a hub for group dialog and a place to let random thoughts fly. Have you thought about replacing that question?
Evan Williams: Yes, we have thought about that. It's a question about the question, because it worked really well to make Twitter approachable, and clear, how to use it. This was something I saw when I worked on Blogger for a bunch of years, we didn't have any direction at all for people, and it was this intimidating thing...kind of like a blank sheet of paper, so we tried to make Twitter very focused. Just say what you're doing, it doesn't have to be profound, or interesting, or anything. But, obviously, it's also limiting. Most users get beyond that and realize just from observing how people use it that they don't have to take that terribly literally. But in some ways I think it trivializes what's going on, and it does limit people's perceptions -- especially new users I think. We're still struggling with that. I wouldn't be surprised if we change it at some point, but we haven't made any decisions.
NP:
Have you any thoughts on what you'd change it to?
EW:
My favorite option is "What's happening?" That sounds a little too like we're trying to be hip, but I think the most accurate thing to say would be "What's happening?" Because what Twitter really is is what people are doing and what's happening around them, and some of the most interesting news cases are when people are reporting on things that are around them, or events. "What's happening?" can also apply to yourself, what you're thinking about or what's happening in the world that you're commenting on.
NP:
How about a simple "Wassup?" That covers what's happening and what you're thinking.
EW:
Yeah. Maybe.
NP:
Because it's so new, we're still figuring out social etiquette on Twitter. What rules do you personally tweet by?
EW:
I personally don't like to have a lot of rules. I'm sure I do have my own rules but I always hesitate to imply that there's any rules, because I think the beauty of Twitter is that people use it however it works for them. I think it changes depending on how many followers and what people are expecting from you. For the majority of users Twitter's very much about people that they know or people who are close to them, the friends and family type use. It's very casual. You can tweet about things that would be mundane except for the fact that you care about this person, and maybe you're interested in what they're doing at the moment. Right now I have over a hundred thousand followers so I try not to let that freak me out, because, if I did, I think I'd become much less interesting, trying to be interesting too much. So I don't know if I have any rules beyond that, but I try to just still be personable and personal and not trivial but not think about it too much.
NP:
In a way "micro-blogging" is a very confusing moniker for Twitter because those that blog and tweet like yourself, know the two forms of communication have a very different feel and purpose. A blog is a more formal, well thought out thing, and Twitter takes the pressure off blogging because it really is just a thought thrown out into the world. What mental criteria do you use when you express in the different forms?
EW:
They definitely overlap. One comment on the term "micro-blogging", it's not one that we've ever used to describe Twitter. We see micro-blogging as one of the many use cases for Twitter. There are people who use it very much like a blog, although blogs are used in every possible way so it's hard to even define what that means. Twittering has definitely impacted how much I blog. I hardly ever blog now, and I've blogged for years. I think, in a lot of ways they serve the same basic purpose, which is having a thought and wanting to share it with the world. The main difference for me is whether or not I want to take the time to flesh out something a little bit more on a blog, and that just comes down to the length I think.
NP:
I like your less is more approach. I sort of feel that when photos went from print to jpeg, and when text went from paper to websites and blogs, in a way we became overwhelmed with a compulsion for what I call digital diarrhea. All of a sudden there were no limits imposed by cost, and we're actually learning now that we need to impose limits on ourselves, and that's a lesson that Twitter's teaching the masses with the strict 140 character count.
EW:
It's something that goes very well with the fact that there's more and more voices out there, and more and more people who are publishing and saying things that are interesting to pay attention to. At least having some constraints on the verboseness of everyone's thoughts is helpful in order to tap in and listen to more voices.
NP:
It's like a conversation that no one's allowed to hog.
EW:
Yes. Exactly.
NP:
Twitter has created a new hierarchy of celebrity. [At the time of writing] Stephen Fry, who's a relatively unknown here in the U.S., is the leading non-presidential Twitterer* (according to Twitterholic Barack Obama has the largest Twitter following). Fry is way ahead of Britney Spears for example. Are you enjoying how Twitter members have reshuffled the world order, and created one of their own?
EW:
[laughs] Yes, definitely. I think it's very early, and very exciting for us to see the celebrities outside the geek world adopting it. It's really exciting with someone like Stephen; Stephen is really understanding it and using it as a medium of its own rather than just a promotional vehicle for other things.
A lot of celebrities are looking at social media, and are considering that they have to have a social media strategy, and Twitter and Facebook and all these things need to be incorporated. It'll be really interesting to see how that fleshes out over the next few months. I remember in the early days of blogging, when I was a popular blogger for the first year or two -- it was a very good sign when I became not a popular blogger and people who were much more skilled in that medium became the attraction rather than the geeks.
A lot of celebrities are looking at social media, and are considering that they have to have a social media strategy, and Twitter and Facebook and all these things need to be incorporated. It'll be really interesting to see how that fleshes out over the next few months. I remember in the early days of blogging, when I was a popular blogger for the first year or two -- it was a very good sign when I became not a popular blogger and people who were much more skilled in that medium became the attraction rather than the geeks.
NP:
Are there any celebs that you might not have followed in the real world that you now follow because of the way they tweet?
EW:
Yeah. I don't follow many in the real world, but the ones I've been enjoying on Twitter, well Shaquille O'Neal is an interesting example. I'm not a basketball fan, in the same vein with Lance Armstrong, it's not a world I would pay much attention to, but I follow their twitters and it's interesting to see their lives and what they're talking about. Rainn Wilson is another one. Rainn plays Dwight in The Office, the U.S. version, and he's hilarious. His Twitter persona is somewhat like his character on the show. He just started but he seems to be taking to it.
NP:
The way certain celebs use Twitter actually takes the power away from the paparazzi and the vacuous celebrity mags and blogs. Celebs are actually letting followers know what they're really thinking and doing, which is a genius way to combat the rumor-mill.
EW:
Yes. And some have become very aware of that. Certainly Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore have been talking about that aspect. It was hilarious, a couple of weeks ago Demi actually posted a picture of a paparazzi on TwitPic, completely turning the tables, and she made some jokes laughing at him.
NP:
It seems like a very special time on Twitter right now, very reminiscent of the early days of MySpace, before it became commercialized. One of the beauties of Twitter right now is that you're focusing on building it and getting it right before you monetize it. As a user and a fan of your own service, do you worry what will happen once the twits invade Twitter?
EW:
[laughs] I don't worry about the things that we're going to do because I think there's a lot of opportunities for monetization that actually enhance the user experience, and enhance what people are already doing. I think the dynamics are different than say a MySpace, where they sort of had to put a lot of ads on there on the pages that maybe work against the flow of what people are trying to do. With Twitter, I think there's a lot of opportunity to help people and make money at the same time.
Once of the things we've been talking about for a long time is search, and how we want to build that more and more into the product -- search is an area of course on the web that's always been highly monetizable. We don't expect Twitter search to have the same type of ads or work as well as web search, but I think when people are seeking particular information there is an opportunity to answer their queries, and there are people who want to be among the answers to their query. So monetizing search I think will make a lot of sense in the same way that Google have ads in their search that don't interfere, and in many cases help the user experience.
What I do worry about more, and we're seeing it somewhat today, is as Twitter gets bigger and bigger there are people who are trying to game the system, and basically spam it for their own gain. It gets harder and harder to deal with. Most popular properties, Google and Facebook and MySpace and everybody else, have to deal with spammers, and we are now too, and we'll have to invest more and more into that. I think that's the bigger threat...obviously I'm biased, but I don't think our own monetization efforts will be something that users reject.
Once of the things we've been talking about for a long time is search, and how we want to build that more and more into the product -- search is an area of course on the web that's always been highly monetizable. We don't expect Twitter search to have the same type of ads or work as well as web search, but I think when people are seeking particular information there is an opportunity to answer their queries, and there are people who want to be among the answers to their query. So monetizing search I think will make a lot of sense in the same way that Google have ads in their search that don't interfere, and in many cases help the user experience.
What I do worry about more, and we're seeing it somewhat today, is as Twitter gets bigger and bigger there are people who are trying to game the system, and basically spam it for their own gain. It gets harder and harder to deal with. Most popular properties, Google and Facebook and MySpace and everybody else, have to deal with spammers, and we are now too, and we'll have to invest more and more into that. I think that's the bigger threat...obviously I'm biased, but I don't think our own monetization efforts will be something that users reject.
NP:
Your service is free, as is much of the internet. Are we getting to a point where people need to start valuing the stuff on the net? Now that we have micro-blogging should we have micro-payments for the content and services that we use?
EW:
People have talked about that for years and it hasn't seemed to work for one reason or another. I think the economic climate that we're in, and getting deeper into, is definitely going to bring up these questions again. How should these things be paid for? Obviously they cost money. Advertising has been the default answer, it hasn't been the only answer, but over the short history of the web it's been the one winning answer time and time again for most mainstream services. Whether that will still be the answer -- I don't know. I tend to think that a combination of subscription and advertising probably makes sense for most services, and we see a likelihood that the same will be true for Twitter.
I think there's pretty good reasons why micro-payments for content haven't worked out that well, and, in part, it is there's just so much competition for attention -- it's still the scarcest commodity -- and there's always people who are willing to do something for free, and so you have to be really special and rare to be able to charge money, at least for content.
I think there's pretty good reasons why micro-payments for content haven't worked out that well, and, in part, it is there's just so much competition for attention -- it's still the scarcest commodity -- and there's always people who are willing to do something for free, and so you have to be really special and rare to be able to charge money, at least for content.
NP:
You've recently announced a $35 million injection of venture capital. You still have a relatively small 29-person headcount, so what are you planning to spend it on?
EW:
Well, we also have a good amount of money left in the bank from our last financing. But the reason the we did that, took that investment, is basically because we feel like we're just getting started, and our growth is phenomenal, and as that continues over the next few months and couple of years, our cost is definitely going to go up substantially.
We need to grow the team in a lot of ways right now. I mean it's great that we're so small but it's also painful in some scenarios, so we have pretty ambitious hiring goals across all aspects of the company. We're going to keep the majority of the people technical, and product and engineering will continue to be the bulk of the company, but we're really thinking long term.
We don't know all the ways we're going to use that money, hopefully we'll keep a lot of it in the bank. If we never need a lot of it, that's great, but in the climate we're in we don't want to assume too much, and we don't want any short term concerns to distort the potential of our long term vision, and our investors and the boards and everybody is very on board for building a very long term viable company. We need to do that step by step, and we need to invest a lot to get there.
We need to grow the team in a lot of ways right now. I mean it's great that we're so small but it's also painful in some scenarios, so we have pretty ambitious hiring goals across all aspects of the company. We're going to keep the majority of the people technical, and product and engineering will continue to be the bulk of the company, but we're really thinking long term.
We don't know all the ways we're going to use that money, hopefully we'll keep a lot of it in the bank. If we never need a lot of it, that's great, but in the climate we're in we don't want to assume too much, and we don't want any short term concerns to distort the potential of our long term vision, and our investors and the boards and everybody is very on board for building a very long term viable company. We need to do that step by step, and we need to invest a lot to get there.
NP:
What additions and refinements would you like to see on the site?
EW:
There's a ton of stuff we want to add and improve but the interesting thing is for most of Twitter's history the vast majority of our resources have gone into just keeping up with the growth. There were some fairly publicly painful scaling issues early on. Really, up until about six months ago, we had really bad reliability problems. The product has really changed very little since we launched it, and it a lot of ways that's very good.
I think simplicity is definitely key, but we think there's a ton of ways it can be enhanced. One is to make it just a lot easier, especially easier to get started. As we're seeing more and more mainstream users coming on the service, we have a lot of awareness right now but we want to get a lot better about turning that awareness into engagement. It's still way to hard when you first find out about Twitter to really make it useful and interesting -- that comes down to finding people to follow, connecting with your friends, understanding even what it does and what the concept is. There's a lot to do just on the user experience.
I think simplicity is definitely key, but we think there's a ton of ways it can be enhanced. One is to make it just a lot easier, especially easier to get started. As we're seeing more and more mainstream users coming on the service, we have a lot of awareness right now but we want to get a lot better about turning that awareness into engagement. It's still way to hard when you first find out about Twitter to really make it useful and interesting -- that comes down to finding people to follow, connecting with your friends, understanding even what it does and what the concept is. There's a lot to do just on the user experience.
NP:
It's interesting how you do adapt Twitter, and make it work for you. For me, the initial idea of having all these updates by cell phone horrified me, because I'm one of these people that's over-connected rather than under-connected. So the way I use it -- I don't even connect it to my phone -- but I use it as almost a ticker-tape of the collective consciousness on my computer.
EW:
Do you have a client on your computer of just the website?
NP:
I guess I should use a client so it automatically updates. I mean, talk about collective consciousness, today the one thing that dropped onto our Twitter radar has been TwitterFox, the Naan Studio application which does updates via Firefox.
EW:
Yes, and we hear that a lot, people find how Twitter works for them, and a lot of times they love the SMS or they hate the SMS and a desktop client or an iPhone client really works for them. That's one of the beauties of it. We've been really fortunate with our third-party developers, who have built a lot of these alternative ways to experience Twitter, and they've added a lot of value. What we haven't done enough of, and this goes back to were we need to improve, is helping people discover those different ways, and really walking them through what the different options are, and just ramping them up from an uninitiated state to get them engaged.
NP:
As you expand, and get more mainstream users, and perhaps less responsible users, will you have to police the site more? I know that you say you hate rules, but for example, Google have recently started more aggressively policing Blooger's content. Can you see a point where you're going to have to have a department to police in the same way other social networking sites do?
EW:
I probably wouldn't use the term "policing." We already do have people dedicated to suspending accounts if they spam or are otherwise violating our terms of service. That will definitely have to continue and be a bigger part of our efforts. Part of that will be technical and algorithmic ways to discover fishy behavior and part of it will always have to be manual review.
In cases where it's clear cut and people are definitely being nefarious, then it's actually a little bit easier to deal with than when people are gaming the system in some way but are fairly legit users in other ways. For example there's what we call aggressive following. It's something a lot of people do in order to get attention. As you know when you follow someone, most people will get an email and then they'll check out your profile and those people will follow you back, out of obligation or some other reason.
In cases where it's clear cut and people are definitely being nefarious, then it's actually a little bit easier to deal with than when people are gaming the system in some way but are fairly legit users in other ways. For example there's what we call aggressive following. It's something a lot of people do in order to get attention. As you know when you follow someone, most people will get an email and then they'll check out your profile and those people will follow you back, out of obligation or some other reason.
NP:
Right. There is this social etiquette that makes you think if they're following me I should follow them to be polite.
EW:
Exactly, and we really hate people feeling obligated to follow someone, especially when that person's just following someone in order to get attention. So part of that is user behavior and the social norms that need to develop around Twitter, so people understand that they don't need to do that. And then also discourage or de-incentivize someone from doing the aggressive behavior, because I think that lessens the value of the network for everyone.
NP:
You don't want it to be reduced a popularity contest, with people collecting friends but not adding to the conversation.
EW:
Exactly.
*Since writing this article, Britney Spears has overtaken Stephen Fry, marking the end of an era of geek rule at Twitter.
Click HERE to sign up for a Twitter account, and follow us at: Twitter.com/SuicideGirls.
*Since writing this article, Britney Spears has overtaken Stephen Fry, marking the end of an era of geek rule at Twitter.
Click HERE to sign up for a Twitter account, and follow us at: Twitter.com/SuicideGirls.
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