Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

Yesterday's highlight, I think, was at the end of the day when Twitter's Biz Stone mounted the stage, and Fortune interviewed him with respect to Twitter's internal operations, its future plans, and Stone's own perspective on the business itself. Biz Stone is a young guy who spoke authoritatively about his company, but carried no title, at least not one that was disclosed to the audience. He volunteered that he is as close as Twitter has to a PR guy, and he said that one of his primary functions has always been blogging about the firm and its product.

Taking my job very seriously, during the 28 minutes in which Biz was on stage I issued 30 tweets, and so, for the benefit of all of you who did not follow the event "live," as it were, I have reprinted these tweets below, in the order in which they were tweeted:

1. Twitter's Biz Stone now being interviewed on stage - Twitter about Twitter for a Twitter
2. Biz Stone: Twitter now up to about 55 employees (!) stuffed into a loft
3. Will Twitter ever make money? About 40% of audience thinks NO
4. Level of awareness way bigger than level of engagement for us right now and we have to focus on that
5. One thing: here's Twitter search, that kind of app - this increases usage
6. Biz is head of PR "sort of" but just focus on core compelling product and people will write about it
7. Why are people angry that Twitter isn't making money? Biz: because lots of folks like us and want us to succeed
8. Plan is to "show some signs of life" on revenue generation sometime this year
9. Launching today or tomorrow - suite of educational stuff, a subsite Twitter 101. Cases, best practices
10. BestBuy - Twelpforce effort - get 700 employees all across BB available to help customers instantaneously
11. Other side of spectrum - mom and pop shops - Stone saw a bakery "follow us on Twitter we'll Tweet when cookies are warm"
12. Stolen biz plans weren't too revealing, according to Stone - he seems SO laid back to me!
13. Monetization ideas - everyone has their own list. Stone says maybe commercial accounts, services related to this
14. RT @jimfinwick: RT @defcon_5: Stone: Want a revenue model that scales with the network, not something that feels tacked on.
15. High level idea for monetization is to add value - watch how users interact with Twitter and try to add service or value
16. Why did Twitter catch fire in 2009? Stone: Major world events (starting with election, then earthquakes, Iran, etc)
17. Atlanta fuel shortage, Moldovian revolt, earthquakes, Iran, celebrity sign-ups -all built interest in Twitter
18. We opened our infratructure for others to do APIs and had no idea how terrific it would be, it just worked
19. Now when we think about Twitter we think about it as a whole ecosystem
20. The more value added to ecosystem the more value Twitter will have as a biz
21. Twitter gaming possibilities: Stone says he's fascinated by idea. Lots of game-like activities already
22. confluence of gaming, Twitter, and learning - playing games is how animals learn
23. WalMart says thousands of Tweets every 5 min - they REALLY need analytics and happy to pay for it
24. Stone answers WalMart: lots of 3rd party apps that help organize and analyze
25. Sentiment analysis tool we had at Twitter, but engineers didn't think it was always accurate
26. How do you keep Twitter a "force for good" like in Iran? Stone: Twitter will always remain free
27. One of things Twitter wants to do is have a positive impact on world and only way to do this is to make tons of money
28. Twitter working environment: they focus on culture & comm. One team just to make the other teams happy
29. Twitter hires some for sense of humor, do we want to hang out with this person, do they have a Twitter acct
30. Twitter is just a 2-yr-old company, don't want to be like the child star who grew up freaky, but more like Ron Howard