COO Twitter On Stage at Real Time Crunch Up
This morning I dropped by Tech Crunch’s Real Time Crunch Up which is taking place all day at the Intercontinental Hotel in SF. You can still catch the afternoon sessions via this live Ustream.
In an obvious nod to Twitter as the real time leader, Dick Costolo, Twitter’s new COO, appeared first on stage for a 30-min one-on-one discussion with the inimitable Mike Arrington of TechCrunch. (Inimitable? Who else tells his staff to “Get off the stage, Eric” on stage, in front of an audience of about 300?)
Mike started by asking Dick (jokingly) “So, what’s happening?” a reference to the recent change to Twitter’s user prompt (which used to be “What are you doing?”).
Dick talked about that change, and the removal of the Suggested User List, as being first steps towards addressing the Twitter’s huge onboarding problem. He admitted that lots of new users sign up for Twitter, and then “fly into a cliff and catch on fire. If you’re brave enough you climb back on the cliff.”
The brief discussion continued around funding and monetization. Twitter’s got an astounding $155 million in the bank – and their burn rate is the least of Twitter’s worries, according to Dick. On the horizon for Twitter is monetization – through advertising, syndication, and commercial accounts for example. In Dick’s words, their advertising program will be “fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it” (half-joking, he’s a funny guy!). He forecasted a launch of early next year. As for syndication, Twitter will continue to foster ubiquity of its Tweets, for example through recent agreements with Bing and Google. And of course, Twitter’s been talking about commercial accounts for awhile, which would include service level agreements, analytics dashboard, etc – something a lot of companies have been waiting for.
The 30-minute interview with Dick led into the second session of the day: “Filtering the Stream: Getting Rid of the Noise” which featured 11 panel speakers (!) who continued to talk about Twitter, among many other things. No wrap-up of that session – it was a bit disjointed – but I’ll post some thoughts at another time about filtering noise, once I figure out how to do that myself.
