30 november 2010
De nieuwe CEO van Twitter, Dick Costolo, weet niet wat het nut van zijn dienst is. Op dit moment is hij er nog diep over aan het nadenken. Costolo vertrouwt dit toe aan de Britse krant The Telegraph. Op de vraag wat nu eigenlijk het nut is van Twitter antwoordt hij: ‘I am working on clarity around that at the moment’, zo stelt Costolo. ‘I am currently trying to define what Twitter’s purpose is in the long term. We will be able to be more specific on that answer in the near future’. Tja. Costolo is sinds begin oktober CEO van Twitter, hij nam het stokje over van Evan Williams. Die topman deed afstand van zijn hoofdpositie maar bleef wel in dienst bij Twitter. Hij concentreert zich alleen nog op productstrategie. De nieuwe CEO was voorheen COO bij Twitter en daarvoor stond hij aan het hoofd van Feedburner. Die startup is begin 2007 overgenomen door Google.
Per dag worden er volgens The Telegraph 360.000 nieuwe Twitter-accounts aangemaakt. De waarde van de microblogdienst wordt geschat op ongeveer 1 miljard euro. Nederlanders zijn fervente twitteraars, zij posten ongeveer 5 procent van alle twitterberichten. ‘With 370,000 people joining Twitter every day, and a valuation of $1bn from analysts Ovum, now is the time to focus on making profits and expanding globally. That task is considerably harder if nobody knows what Twitter is for’, merkt de krant droogjes op. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s medeoprichter en ‘chairman of the Board’, stelt: ‘It is hard to speak about Twitter’s vision without factoring in how much of its purpose has been defined by its users over the years. Users came up with so many parts of the service, such as the ‘hashtag’ [which allows people to link to a subject or an event] as so many people use it in so many different ways. Twitter needs to continue being a good listener and recognise that the service has been redefined by lots of people, tweet by tweet, but also come up with its priorities’. Hij zegt dat ‘Twitter’s redesign … was an attempt to make the purpose of the site clearer. A lot of people don’t understand that in order to get the most out of Twitter, you don’t have to tweet. With the new redesign we have tried to improve the ways people discover the most relevant users to follow and how they can discover the best content too. We think of Twitter as a mini web within the web – which, when managed efficiently, can be one the most useful ways to discover hugely relevant real time information…You don’t have to tweet to be a great Twitter user and we are trying to change that misperception’. In april van dit jaar lanceerde Twitter de ‘promoted suite’ met advertentieproducten, de eerste poging om de commercialiseren. Costolo stelde dat ‘it had gone well so far and the company was now looking to offer local advertising, via promoted tweets’. Het uitbreiden van het bedrijf brengt allerlei nieuwe uitdagingen. ‘At the moment I am focusing on trying to ensure Twitter retains the culture of the successful tech start-up it began life as’, zo stelt de CEO. ‘We have gone past the point now where everyone knows everyone else’s name in the company. We now employ 325 people and are growing by the day. It is important while we open up new offices, to make sure we are still able to innovate at the same pace and grow the organisation without adding layers of unnecessary bureaucracy’. Het is wel handig als voor iedereen duidelijk is wat het nut van Twitter is….
