Clearly Biz Stone gets it. And what he gets isn’t just how to optimize the thing that he helped create, but how to react to the fact that Twitter’s users have redefined it.
Addressing Twitter’s future at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference, Stone said:
“We started out by creating this very simple status updating system. And that’s not what Twitter is. It evolved into something else,”
and:
“We have ongoing discussions with a lot of companies. One of the ways we look at Twitter, and the landscape in general, is not as a zero-sum game but how we can reduce a lot of friction between a lot of companies,” Stone said in an interview at the Fortune Brainstorm: TECH conference.
“In other words, we see ourselves as complementary to big social networks, to search engines, to big commercial sites,” he said.
Stone says there will be add-on services and efforts to educate users on how to make money using Twitter.
Twitter might become part of basic communications infrastructure for companies as well as people, and it might not. Either way, I’m enjoying watching Twitter management swing for the fences when they could easily opt instead to become regulars at all the hot spots in the South of France.
Update:: Here’s Twitter’s initial formal effort toward a business guide.
