Evan Williams hypes up importance of Twitter – money is secondary concern

You may be thinking Twitter is just a social networking site that enables people to tweet about their lives on a daily basis. No matter how dull those lives may be. But no, it’s more than that, at least according to Twitter CEO and co-founder Evan Williams.

There’s no doubt that Twitter is a phenomenon. Its growth last year when everyone – the media, celebrities, business – seemed to latch on to the site took it from being one of the many also-ran social networking sites into being one of the biggest and most well-known.

And despite a year-end wobble, the site is continuing to grow, with more people sending more tweets than ever before. In fact, the only negative aspect of the site (at least from the company’s point of view) is its lack of revenue. It’s currently surviving on VC funding and despite many hints that revenue-making efforts are on the way none have yet shown up on the public site.

Not a problem, says Williams in an interview with the BBC, as money isn’t the ultimate and overriding goal. He said:

Our goal at Twitter is to be a force for good. We have a fundamental belief, having worked on this type of thing for 10 years, that the open exchange of information has a positive impact on the world. We think it’s particularly exciting in regions where they have less access to information.

Twitter undoubtedly has had a positive impact on some level – allowing ordinary Iranian citizens to reach out to the wider world at election time being the prime example – but it’s hardly world-changing. In the same way that neither is Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, or any other social networking site.

Williams also addressed why Twitter has repeatedly turned down acquisition offers from the likes of Google and Facebook, saying:

Most of the biggest and most interesting services are independent. I believe that companies that are independent are more competitive, ultimately. What we’re working on is technology that has the power to change things, and that’s very, very exciting and motivating.

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government. I think it will be how you get personal, customized information from every entity you care about, from your local café to your government, from your politician to your friends and family.

In that case, Twitter doesn’t want to sell out. But that leaves a big question mark over where the money to keep the site going – and eventually turn a profit – is going to come from. Williams said:

We are working on how we make money. The real scalable business model is still in the works. What we want to do is build something into the product that makes us money and makes the product better. And the more people that use Twitter, the more money we make, the better we can make Twitter.

So the message is clear: keep using Twitter until we figure out how to make money from the site without causing a negative effect on how it operates. If that’s even possible.

Williams’ belief in the service is clearly very strong, but I can’t help wonder if he’s hyping up how Twitter is going to change the world just a little too much. It is, after all, just one of the many new ways we all communicate and interact with each other in this Internet-obsessed age. If it disappeared tomorrow, would anything actually change?

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