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| Dick Costolo For Twitter |
Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Dick Costolo on Monday outlined priorities for making the short-messaging service more useful—efforts that could also put the company into increasing conflict with its allies.
In a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Costolo said Twitter is working to expand a fledgling plan to help its users make sense of blasts of messages that are concentrated around major events and sports, essentially building up more of a presence around live "tentpole"-like events.
Twitter is also trying to make it easier for third parties, such as conference organizers, to organize Twitter posts around smaller-scale gatherings.
At the same time, the six-year-old company, which allows people to post online 140-character messages called tweets, plans to become a more hospitable place for companies to build features that Twitter can't or won't adopt on its own, such as in-depth analysis of sentiment contained in tweets, said Mr. Costolo. The push would make Twitter more of a "platform," much as developers create applications for Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. devices.
In its events push, Mr. Costolo said Twitter is vying to "more closely tie the shared experience on Twitter to the actual event that is happening." As Twitter burnishes its platform, Mr. Costolo added that Twitter also wants to move away from companies that "build off of Twitter, to a world where people build into Twitter."
The efforts are part of Twitter's continuing mission to increase its service's usage and to build its business. Twitter executives still fight a perception that the service is only for tech geeks or narcissists, and there remain doubts about how big the San Francisco company can grow.
Facebook long ago managed to solve those problems and has more than 900 million active monthly users world-wide and more than $3.7 billion in annual revenue. Twitter has more than 140 million monthly active users and analysts project it will generate less than $300 million in revenue this year.
User growth is key to justify Twitter's $8.4 billion valuation, and pave the way to an initial public offering in a year or so.
Mr. Costolo, a former Google Inc. executive who was appointed Twitter CEO in 2010, has been doing this by expanding advertising personnel and sales, building the executive ranks and pushing the service to be more reliable.
Mr. Costolo said he tells employees, "We need to narrow the gap between awareness of Twitter and engagement of Twitter."
Twitter's goal of making sense of the tweet flood could put the company into more direct competition with media companies that also edit and prioritize news and information, and sell ads to people who come looking for the information. Twitter's Olympics events page, for example, could steal viewership or readership from Comcast Corp.'s NBCUniversal.
Mr. Costolo played down the competition and said Twitter is a "technology company in the media business."
As Twitter works to become a platform, it has put limits on firms creating services that are similar to what Twitter already offers, such as allowing people to write and publish tweets, or that move people to non-Twitter websites. Mr. Costolo reiterated that Twitter will soon explain further restrictions. Some developers say they don't know where Twitter will draw the line between services that mimic or rival what Twitter already does and new features that expand Twitter.
Mr. Costolo also said Twitter is performing well in the fast-growing mobile industry. Some big advertisers have questioned the effectiveness of social media ads, and Web giants such as Google and Facebook have run into hurdles translating their online advertising success to mobile devices, where ad size is smaller and marketers are wary.
"We don't have any problem, we don't think, monetizing Twitter. Period," Mr. Costolo said.
Edited By Cen Fox Post Team
