When TechCrunch got their hands on over 300 private documents from Evan Williams’ email account they decided to publish quite a lot of sensitive information, which has lead to some very interesting insights on how they run the company and the direction they are now heading.

It’s easy to jump to the thought that this is unethical, but consider for a moment that transparency is meant to be one of the fundamentals of the web. There are no secrets and if you can’t hide anything there is little choice but to be totally authentic. Is this a hint at the future of information access?

It’s no revelation that I have had a huge interest in Twitter ever since this variant of blogging emerged three years ago. Since then I have explored a number of perspectives:

• Access to the insights that are available searching this collective consciousness
• That simple web platforms make amazing things happen
• As a channel for meme distribution and focussed activism
• It’s the structure enabled the mob mentality
• How the format translates to the business world
• Using the metaphor of your personal editorial team

I have read the Techcrunch collection and I’m going to detail some of the highlights here:

Purpose and definition

The team struggled to define purpose early on but settled on the idea of Twitter as a public utility. They care most about distribution of content so the service is more of a nervous system than an alert system.  The question they ask is “What does a completely relevant product look like for a billion people?”

Mindset and managing overload

The extreme growth they have experienced has been very chaotic and they weren’t sure how to react to the flood of opportunities that were being presented. The vast array of social connections that opened up were interesting but they realised that people have different mindsets and therefore perceptions about business – referencing a conversation with Diddy they said “it would be hard to explain what we would be doing wrong since he thinks about business differently”.

They now know which of these relationships are the most important to pursue but still see much of the ‘talk’ (even with their own board) as interruptions that distract them from developing the company.

Revenue options
There has been a ridiculous amount of chatter about how Twitter are going to make money. While it’s important for sustainability, there is a reason that venture capitalists exist and that’s because some business models need to focus on huge scale before they can make the numbers work. The team have settled on the idea that charging more to fewer users is a good model, and they define a user as an individual who has a conscious twitter experience in a given week. The two most interesting models they mentioned are:

• Verified commercial accounts are the fastest way to make money. Companies have more money than individuals to spend on this, and arguably they’re also the ones who want to prove their identity most. This is interesting because unlike other Pro account models such as Flickr, Twitter is selling identity instead of features or resources.
• Requiring heavy API users to run ads is another idea. The ‘firehose’ of Twitter updates is a valuable resource because it is in demand and this is another natural model.

Google and the marketplace

Any company the size of Twitter is going to be compared to the rest of the industry. They have had conversations with Facebook, Microsoft, and Google – and have thought about the competitive impact each of those companies could have on them, but also the impact they is having in return. Google can kick their arse at search, but Twitter is already a whopping 90% of Google Blog Search content and they are currently scraping to get the data. This is clearly an opportunity to sell the ‘firehose’ but Twitter want to ensure that searching is a better experience on Twitter itself before they give Google access.

Future focus

There are a few comments that I believe really define the future the team see for themselves.

1) Twitter is an information economy (and most of the access is free)
2) Evan really likes the concept of person to person payments (but the timing isn’t right yet)
3) Twitter should tell me stuff without searching (relates to the historical ‘track’ feature, and google)

It’s going to be very interesting to see what develops now that everyone has access to this information. What does Twitter look like for a billion people?

By Ross Hill - July 20th, 2009 at 12:56pm with 1,268 views - evan williams google techcrunch twitter