{"id":374,"date":"2010-03-15T13:02:39","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T19:02:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.techory.com\/blog\/evan-williams-keynote-interview\/"},"modified":"2010-03-18T16:46:02","modified_gmt":"2010-03-18T22:46:02","slug":"evan-williams-keynote-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/?p=374","title":{"rendered":"Evan Williams Keynote Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Monday, March 15, 2010<br \/>Presenters:<br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/EV\">Evan Williams<\/a> &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techory.com\/blog\/evan-williams-keynote-interview\/http;\/\/twitter.com\">Twitter<\/a><br \/>Umair Haque &#8211; Havas Media Lab<\/p>\n<p>Description:<br \/>Williams has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, the now ubiquitous social media platform that hit its tipping-point at SXSW in 2007. In addition to his role as Director of the Havas Media Lab, Umair Haque founded Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique that shaped strategies across media and consumer industries.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Twitter Announcement: <\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The new @ platform for integrating twitter into websites &quot;<strong>@Anywhere<\/strong>&quot;<\/li>\n<li>You can easily follow people from a link dynamically inside a website (hover). <\/li>\n<li>You can also sign-into a website with your Twitter ID. <\/li>\n<li>13 partners (Digg, Amazon, etc.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>@Anywhere<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It reduces fiction<\/li>\n<li>You can easily tweet from the column itself.<\/li>\n<li>You can easily follow the author straight from the byline.<\/li>\n<li>It puts things into context of a site\/story.<\/li>\n<li>It can give you a connection back to users that wasn&#8217;t previously there.<\/li>\n<li>I can also get more people talking about you or your content, and bring in tweets about your site\/content.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Business<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Focused on how to create the best product for consumers and businesses.<\/li>\n<li>Business is on twitter right now, and consumers are opting into messages from them now.<\/li>\n<li>What is Twitter?<br \/>An information network that helps people discover what&#8217;s going on in the world that they care about and share what is going on around them. You can take advantage without sharing (just follow what you like). <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>How does Twitter handle iteration?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter experiments a lot &#8211; there are a lot of people in twitter doing what they think is best.<\/li>\n<li>People are organized into autonomous teams focused on something specific (international, mobile, etc.)<\/li>\n<li>What is Ev&#8217;s role? <br \/>1\/2 big picture direction, 1\/2 is internal culture of the company. Openness is a big value of twitter. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Openness &#8211; what does it mean at Twitter?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Openness or transparency &#8211; &quot;a windows is transparent, a door is open&quot; A door lets you come in and mess with what&#8217;s going on and not just look at what is going on.<\/li>\n<li>Openness is really a survival technique &#8211; being open to the idea that you&#8217;re wrong, and other people have good ideas. &quot;Assume there are more smart people outside the company vs. inside.&quot;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Why Give the Golden Goose Away?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sharing data openly: MS Bing Google get full stream. There is no business model yet, maybe it doesn&#8217;t make sense to give this data away. Decision was made on principle of giving the most value per user. <\/li>\n<li>There are millions of tweets per day &#8211; tapping into the technology of those partners will allow more people to find\/search, and find valuable information on Twitter.<\/li>\n<li>It was a tough decision to come to&#8230; didn&#8217;t want to limit to just a few folks. Why limit it?<\/li>\n<li>Third party developers have been able to fill holes. How are businesses going to be able to take advantage of Twitter. <\/li>\n<li>There are real businesses to be built on top of Twitter. Twitter.com (the site) isn&#8217;t meant to be used for business. It&#8217;s a consumer interface.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Apple regulates App Store &#8211; how open is Twitter?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Error on the side of openness. <\/li>\n<li>Some control is still needed. Bad things happen all the time. If were were totally fully open, it would be a disservice to our users. It shouldn&#8217;t be easy to spam on twitter &#8211; that needs to be stopped.<\/li>\n<li>Some management is needed for the ecosystem.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Inclusiveness &#8211; Unique Uses<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Chilean sent an email to thank Twitter for the tool to help communicate after the natural disaster.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter is made to reach the weakest communications areas. It&#8217;s very simple.<\/li>\n<li>Pushing really strong growth in areas (India now) with SMS access in regions where the communication infrastructure is not that powerful.<\/li>\n<li>The value of a little bit of information can be really powerful in certain areas of the world.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What is an active user?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Is someone getting value out of twitter? It&#8217;s very hard to nail down what a user is (outside of just having an account).<\/li>\n<li>It could be someone just searching on a site, or using a 3rd party app to watch a brand.<\/li>\n<li>There isn&#8217;t as much emphasis on the &quot;tell the world what you&#8217;re doing,&quot; and now it&#8217;s more &quot;there is something on twitter for everyone.&quot;<\/li>\n<li>As people consume information on twitter, it&#8217;s easier to get involved.<\/li>\n<li>Robert Gibbs (white house press secretary) is using Twitter to send messages you normally don&#8217;t see in an official communication. <\/li>\n<li>India minister is using Twitter in a way that causes some waves. <\/li>\n<li>It reduces the number of walls from people who have influence and those who don&#8217;t (what the internet should be).<\/li>\n<li>If you can share with the world with as few barriers as possible, that&#8217;s a big deal!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Is state-control standing in the way of the Internet (Twitter)?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Not all nations have the open internet. <\/li>\n<li>The internet is a tidal wave that nobody can keep back.<\/li>\n<li>We ultimately want to have an impact on the world (either small or large is good) &#8211; saving someone&#8217;s vacation or announcing the cookies are out of the oven.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Business Model<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Help people make a better decisions that they wouldn&#8217;t have already made. Help people get something done.<\/li>\n<li>Haiti awareness with the donation spread on Twitter. People want to hep out, and reducing the friction helps that.<\/li>\n<li>Looking at how businesses are using Twitter &#8211; there is a new communication method between customers and businesses. It&#8217;s more than just clicking on a link and getting information.<\/li>\n<li>If this channel helps a business get better, that&#8217;s very powerful. It&#8217;s even more powerful if it helps both large and small businesses.<\/li>\n<li>If you live on the web, you are used to having a relationship with the companies you use. In the real world, it is just a black box. You can finally close the loop with these technologies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Ambition &#8211; 21st Century Businesses have Ambitions<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter&#8217;s vision is down to fostering the exchange for information as a force for good.<\/li>\n<li>You can help people control what they pay attention to &#8211; save them time vs. cost them time and share things with other people that they&#8217;ve learned.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Where is Twitter&#8217;s Advantage?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Twitter&#8217;s advantage only comes when everyone wins. They only do win\/win deals.<\/li>\n<li>Revenue generating pieces of twitter haven&#8217;t been implemented because they don&#8217;t want to sacrifice the network. <\/li>\n<li>The advantage is having a more thriving network over the next guy &#8211; creating an advantage for other people. <\/li>\n<li>If you&#8217;re closed there is always an advantage to work around you. When open, it just works and nobody needs to work around the openness.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What makes you keep building these things?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Creating things in the world that didn&#8217;t exist before. Your product should be at the end of the sentence, &quot;Wouldn&#8217;t it be awesome if __________?&quot;<\/li>\n<li>People look at business and money as the goal vs. the means. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monday, March 15, 2010Presenters:Evan Williams &#8211; TwitterUmair Haque &#8211; Havas Media Lab<br \/>\nDescription:Williams has co-founded several Internet companies, including Pyra Labs (creator of weblog-authoring software Blogger) and Twitter, the now ubiquitous social media platform that hit its tipping-point at SXSW in 2007. In addition to his role as Director of the Havas Media Lab, Umair Haque [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":410,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions\/410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techory.com\/sxsw\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}