Twitter CEO Dick Costalo, speaking at World Mobile Congress 2011, in Barcelona, outlined the goals of the social networking and micro-blogging service, and his ambition for the service to become as ubiquitous, necessary and functional as water.
"The amazing thing is, Twitter already works on almost everything you're going to hear about this week," said Costalo. "Twitter works seamlessly across all platforms. Twitter needs to be instantly useful, simple and always present. It needs to be like water."
Costalo painted a picture of the way in which Twitter has empowered users to create their own experiences. "We used to create experiences for our users, now our users are creating experiences for each other."
According to Costalo, 40% of all tweets are created on mobile devices. Fifty percent of Twitter users use the service on multiple platforms.
Reinforcing the Twitter mission statement, “Instantly connecting people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them”, Costalo said the social component of Twitter is in service to deliver the most meaningful information.
Costolo noted that the “micro-blogging” label given to Twitter misses the transformative impact of the service, similar to the way comparing an automobile to a horse-less carriage missed the impact of the innovation on society at large.
In 2008, Twitter registered about 27 tweets per second, while now the service often sustains periods of over 3 000 tweets per second during major events, such as the Superbowl and the World Cup.
"Because of the social context Twitter is providing around interaction, we are seeing that people are starting to watch certain programmes in real-time again. In order to participate socially, they need to be watching live."
Speaking of current world events, such as the uprising in Egypt, Costolo said the commentary surrounding the importance or lack of importance of the role of Twitter and other social media is misdirected. "All we care to do is drive our mission and provide our mission to people. To talk of platforms takes away from what these people have accomplished."
Share