and among the first suggestions the search engine makes to complete the
sentence is, “I don’t get Twitter,” right above “I don’t get no
respect.”
“While that’s funny,” Twitter CEO
Willliams marked the opening of the milestone
conference attended by 500 developers by highlighting how much Twitter
has flourished and how much work remains to help people “get” Twitter.
In the past three years, Twitter has seen its
traffic grow by 1,500 percent a year, reaching 105 million registered
users and gaining about 300,000 new ones a day so far this month, with
more than 60 percent of new users coming from outside
But while Stone, Williams and other Twitter
executives talked a lot about the achievements of the microblogging
site since its 2006 launch, the focus of the first day of the inaugural
“Chirp” conference was the service’s future, and the fact that Twitter
and independent developers need to continue to make improvements if
that rapid growth pace is to continue.
Until now, Williams and Stone said, Twitter has been
a Web platform scrambling to stay functional amid the explosive growth
in traffic it has seen from around the world. But with the number of
employees growing from 35 last year to 175 now, a management team in
place, a stouter computer infrastructure, and the launch this week of
an advertising program, the Twitter executives said the platform now
has a “roadmap” to its future.
“Chirp is not a destination,” Stone told the
audience Wednesday. “It’s a departure. It’s a beginning. It’s the
beginning of a journey we’re going to take together to build a vibrant
ecosystem.”
The conference, which attracted developers from more than two dozen countries, had many hallmarks of Twitter itself.
At times, it was chaotic and crowded. The Wi-Fi
didn’t work, and many people ate lunch on the floor in the lobby of the
venerable Palace of Fine Arts auditorium, kibbutzing with their new
iPads. But also like Twitter, there were a-ha moments, like the
appearance of the singer will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, who declared
Twitter was changing the world because “now you can surf people’s
thoughts” instead of just surfing the Web.
“If there was a collective consciousness,” he said, “to me, that’s what Twitter is.”
Twitter roiled its developer community this week
with its decision to develop some in-house software applications rather
than relying exclusively on independent software developers, as in the
past.
One of those key applications is for the iPhone, and
depends only on Apple’s approval, Williams said in a brief interview.
“It’s a matter of weeks,” he said.
Another new tool Twitter hopes will build the size
of its footprint is called @Anywhere, which allows partners to more
easily embed Twitter into their Web sites. One partner in that program,
two new Twitter tools Wednesday, one called “Friend Follow” that
searches for likely candidates to follow on Twitter, and a second
called “Replay” that allows users to look back in time about what
people were saying about a particular topic at a particular time on
Twitter.
“It’s the first tool that allows you to go back in time” on Twitter, said
Twitter also is developing is a locational Point of
Interest service that would allow users to search all the Tweets being
generated in a particular place, such as a restaurant or a park. While
that will require many people to disclose their physical location to
Twitter, Stone said so many users are agreeing to allow Twitter to
track the location of their Tweets that it won’t be a problem.
talked about the concept of “resonance” in Twitter’s new Promoted
Tweets advertising program, which it announced Tuesday.
Like
AdWords, which highlights ad keywords that attract more clicks and
downplays ads that don’t attract attention from users, Twitter plans to
begin hiding paid “Promoted Tweets” that do not get attention from
users, either by being retweeted, replied to or used in some other
interaction.
“Tweets that don’t resonate with users are going to
disappear as Promoted Tweets,” he said. “We will stop showing
promotions that people don’t like.”
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