RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — Twitter is a largely public sharing platform that, as it's grown from within the U.S. to other parts of the world, has increasingly faced some very hard decisions about what, if anything, to hide from regional Twitter audiences.
"The reality is, internally, that the hardest discussion we have are between the rights of one set of users and the rights of another set of users balanced against the laws of that country," said Twitter CEO Dick Costolo during a wide-ranging discussion with Recode's Kara Swisher at the inaugural Code Conference.
Costolo explained that Twitter has to look at the request and make sure it's legal and valid and then make the decision about whether or not to hide that Twitter content, while still showing it to the rest of the service's roughly 255 million users.
Despite the scrutiny the social network now faces as a public company, Costolo characterized 2014 as a good year. He noted, however, that there is some discontinuity between the public perception of a "public" company and what's actually going on inside:
"When you’re public, the public markets are talking about what you did two months ago, while internally you’re talking about something else," said Costolo.
As as the company scales, Costolo said he is keenly aware of the tendency to make safe choices. He said he wants to encourage Twitter employees to "make the bold choice."
Size, scale and audience
Costolo has come under increasing pressure to meet user growth expectations and, during the interview, the Twitter CEO repeatedly turned to the idea of a wider audience outside the traditional user base. According to Costolo, there is a whole group of people who consume Tweets by visiting Twitter profiles, without ever logging in. He also noted that Twitter has an impact well beyond the platform when people see Tweets on other platforms.
Ryan Seacrest joined Swisher and Costolo on stage and talked about the importance of social media for the shows he produces, like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and ABC's Mixology. "I believe that conversation about your show is important," said Seacrest, who added that when Ryan Seacrest Productions signs a deal with a network, they need to do everything they can to promote the show, which includes the use of social media.
The American Idol host also revealed that while BlackBerry had won the battle in its lawsuit over Seacrest’s very BlackBerry-esque iPhone keyboard accessory called Typo, he planned on releasing a new product in the near future. Seacrest, who actually took the stage right after BlackBerry CEO John Chen, noted that they had hugged it out.
Costolo touched on recent comments by NBC's Research Chief who said Tweets don’t increase viewership, saying that he thinks the comments may have been taken out of context and believes that "Twitter is this amazing complimentary partner with all the things NBC is trying to do." He added that recent studies from the Fox Network show that people who see Twitter conversations about shows are more likely to watch or DVR. We suspect the jury is still out on this point.
Seacrest, for one, is embracing the marriage of traditional and social media. "I strongly believe that nothing is going away: TV? Absolutely not. Radio? Absolutely not," said Seacrest.
Up ahead
Twitter's efforts to make the platform more accessible to more people and to be, perhaps, more specific continues. Costolo noted that Twitter is working on making Tweets more localized. So if Twitter has a new user in a new country, it might try to show her more relevant and useful localized content.
In addition, Twitter is looking for ways to let users move conversations that started in the public space private, perhaps into Direct Messaging. That, however, may require a significant increase in DM functionality.
No comments:
Post a Comment