6:00 p.m. update:
Peppered with questions about the possibility of finally generating revenue, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced that the company would be introducing many significant changes, such as providing businesses with effective ways of using the site and possibly even traditional advertising.
“One of the things we really want to do is to have a positive impact on the world,” Stone said. “The only way we can do that is by making tons of money. We’re not in this to be altruists. We need to have an extremely profitable self-sustaining company in order to do well in the world.”
Stone noted that the company would be seeking to improve primarily in two ways – by generating revenue and providing the consumers with a more complete and useful experience.
The revenue strategy focuses on helping businesses big and small use the site, whether letting Dell sell computers with Twitter or having a bakery tweet its pie of the day.
Though the conference attendees wanted to know about revenue, the consumer experience is where Stone feels Twitter has even more room to expand.
“The level of awareness is way bigger than the level of engagement right now,” he said.
“We’re a two year old company so we don’t want to be that child actor that got success early and grew up all freaky. We want to be Ron Howard,” he added.
Twitter was created in 2006, but it was not until the past year that it became one of the internet’s most popular sites. Stone said that as a result the site had limited resources and was still only 1 percent of what he felt could be accomplished.
“We spent a lot of 2008 just trying to get ahead technically of the unexpected popularity,” he said. “That was a bummer because we weren’t delivering a lot of value to our users.”
Stone wants to position the product not as a rudimentary social tool but as “a communication and information network for discovering what’s happening right now.”
He said this could involve anything from promoting the most important posts on a certain subject to linking search results. Thus far, Twitter has grown most as a tool as news happens such as the elections in Iran, a service Stone thinks will be unaffected by profit seeking.
Earlier:
The new CEO of America Online, Tim Armstrong, outlined a five-point strategy for resurrecting the ailing Internet giant on Thursday.
Meanwhile, AOL's former boss -- Jon Miller, the new digital chief of NewsCorp – said his strategy for the media conglomerate will focus on creating premium experiences in a world overwhelmed by free content.
“If it isn’t premium and differentiated you are certainly not going to pay for it,” Miller said at the Fortune Brainstorm tech conference in Pasadena. “But I’ve seen that there are experiences now that people are recognizing as premium. Some
