Life Is Tweet
Boston Globe, January 06, 2009
By Erica Noonan
You cofounded Twitter.com with venture-capital money back in 2006, and it still isn’t turning a profit. In November, the company declined Facebook’s offer to buy it for $500 million. Say what? We admire and respect Facebook. We are big fans, actually. They approached us, and we took it seriously. But we feel like we want to continue this path we’re on—sustaining this innovation—and the time is not right.
I guess we have a lot of things we think we can prove. We’re thinking really hard about sustainability and revenue and about developing the technology and seeing it taking off.
The 2008 presidential election was Twitter’s biggest day ever. Do you think the technology impacted the election in a positive or negative way?
We expected it to be big, and it was—activity was up by 500 percent. Both [Barack] Obama and [John] McCain twittered, and we had a special election news page set up for all the tweets. Someone called this the first “two-screen” election—people were glued to their televisions and the Internet, reacting to the debates and then the election as they happened. I feel like we helped change democracy to real time.
It’s pretty cool to invent a technology with its own set of descriptive terms. People “twitter” and “tweet” and . . . Someone came up with the word “twoops” to refer to a message you meant to text your friend, but you sent it to Twitter by accident.
