Twitter is not a business. I know its founders would like to think it is. It is, for the most part, a diversion.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I think if you look down the road for Twitter, we would like to be a company - a service - that is used by billions of people around the world in every country in the world because we feel that the power of Twitter is that it brings people closer to each other, to their governments, to their heroes, etc.
Twitter is definitely not the place to handle business per se.
Twitter isn't a social network, it's an information network.
'What is Twitter?' has always been a tough question to answer.
You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That's the value, not the brand 'Twitter.' Twitter just provides the venue for it.
Twitter was like a poem. It was rich, real and spontaneous. It really fit my style. In a year and a half, I tweeted 60,000 tweets, over 100,000 words. I spent a minimum eight hours a day on it, sometimes 24 hours.
The first complaint we hear from everyone is: 'Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother's eating for lunch?' But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled - you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share.
We actually tried to invest in Twitter in April 2007, right when it launched. At the time, the company was wary of having a classic, tier-one traditional venture firm involved.
I love Twitter! At first I made fun of it, because it is very narcissistic, and there's already so much narcissism flowing in this industry, I was like, 'Really, one more?' So I was against it at first. But I really love the idea of the direct connection - there's no middle man muddling it up.
Twitter is just like posting old-fashioned press releases, and it can be very effective in promoting your business interests and charity work.