If you’re not reaching, engaging, and monetizing customers on mobile, you’re likely losing them to someone else. Register now for the 8th annual MobileBeat, July 13-14, where the best and brightest will be exploring the latest strategies and tactics in the mobile space.
ASPEN, Colorado — “I think of Twitter primarily as a news system,” Twitter cofounder and board member Ev Williams said today.
That, in the long run, has shaped the way the service grew. Six years ago, Williams said, the company made the decision to see its primary product not primarily as a social network but as a real-time information-sharing network.
Williams was speaking onstage today at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference.
The result, he said, is that Twitter contains everything you might want to know about — like today’s news of a nuclear deal with Iran — but it’s not necessarily very easy to find it.
Consequently, Twitter is busy building new tools to better organize information so you can actually find it.
But when asked about the role of third-party developers in that job, Williams was a little cagey.
“There’s a storyline about Twitter that these third-party developers and apps drove all this growth, and I don’t think that’s exactly true,” Williams said.
However, he acknowledged that the company has not developed its platform to the extent that it could. Moves like cutting off the ability for third-party developers to create their own Twitter clients didn’t exactly help.
The unfettered, open API “wasn’t a win-win for the users, developers, and the company,” Williams said, by way of explanation.
Unstated by Williams: It was actually more of a loss for the third part of that trio — Twitter itself — which was losing control of its key asset, the “firehose” of tweets and associated data about them.
Now, however, there’s a sign that Williams might recognize the need for more openness.
“Twitter should be more of a platform than it is,” Williams said.
However, he didn’t offer specifics on how it might achieve that goal.
That’s probably a project best left to the next chief executive.
More information:
Powered by VBProfiles
VB’s research team is studying mobile user acquisition…
Chime in here, and we’ll share the results.
Originally published on VentureBeat » Dylan Tweney: http://ift.tt/1HtVexV
