An in-depth conversation on 10 years of tweeting, the importance of live media, and “the puddle.”
Last year, amid a cratering stock price, slowing user growth, and a spate of executive departures, Twitter Inc.'s board decided to put co-founder Jack Dorsey in as chief executive.
Ten months later, all the same problems remain. But Dorsey has a clearer message about what he wants to change and how he wants to change it. As investors speculate about who will buy Twitter and when, Dorsey has allowed himself to think years down the road. In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he hints at that future. Will Twitter, currently tasked with showing you what's happening right now, be able to predict for you what's going to happen next? Is it the killer app for augmented reality?
Dorsey says Twitter's role in the world still centers around bringing people together to watch live events in the place where information comes the fastest. A decade after Twitter's founding, he has faith in the crowd and its ability to bring forth a range of opinions—balancing Donald Trump's inaccuracies, for instance—but he also talks about the importance of making Twitter a safer place to speak without fear of being attacked or harassed. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
Twitter has been around for exactly 10 years. And fairly or not, there has been an impression from the outside of decline. Do you feel you've arrested that? Do you feel the changes are having an impact?
Jack Dorsey: Well, it's early, but I'm really confident in what's ahead. I think over the 10 years, we've seen Twitter be so influential in the world, and we've seen so many dramatic-use cases of the service.
Our first wave of usage was really around the tech early adopters, as you're aware. But our second wave was around journalists and writers. Over the 10 years, every wave thereafter was an entirely new-use case—a new way of people finding their voice. For people who were new to the service, it was just a very fast and easy way to figure out what's happening around whatever their interest was.
The election year has always been good to us: 2008 was a massive, massive year for us, and this is a massive year for us. People can get into it immediately and see commentary that they care about. They make a connection with someone they didn't know before or they weren't expecting to meet.
We've seen an inhibition of usage because of safety concerns, for instance, and I think we've done an amazing job at building better tools for people and also changing policy over the years.
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There are some people who say, "Twitter absolutely needs to increase monthly active users," others who say, "Twitter should be happy just being the size it is and figure out the content strategy." What is your philosophy about how Twitter should grow?
I think as anything grows, you get in this mode of paying more attention to the folks you don't have instead of the folks you do have. And we have a mindset of making sure that we're building a stronger tool and a more powerful tool for the people we do have. And when you do that, when you have that focus, and when you're really listening to your customers, it tends to grow.
In the past, when people heard about Twitter, they assumed that the way to use it was you had to tweet about something. I think more and more people are seeing it as, "I can just see what's happening in the world. I can see what's happening about any event." And the faster we make it for people to realize that, we grow this amazing daily audience around any particular event around the globe.
Then our work is to connect them to people they want to follow long term, and then our work is to convince them that actually you should talk about it, you should share something. We are a conversational medium around these live events. That's the easiest way to get in.
So we're focused on strengthening that and simplifying that path.
How far out do you think about Twitter? Do you ever think about what it would look like 10 years from now?
There's a whole discussion around virtual reality and augmented reality, and Twitter has been augmenting reality for 10 years. You watch any game, you watch any live event, you watch any political debate, Twitter makes it more interesting, funnier, entertaining. I think Periscope takes that a step further by actually pulling them together on one screen. So if you were to very humbly think of Twitter as a chat room—a global chat room—it's been this room that people talk about the world and what's happening in the world nonstop.
And you see the same thing with Periscope. You've got these chat rooms on top of a live video stream. And that's created some really surprising interactions. I don't know if you saw the puddle live on Periscope. Did you see it?
We had this guy who pointed his camera outside his window in England. It was a puddle, and the puddle was about this deep, and it got 10 folks, and 100 viewers, and then 1,000 viewers, and up to 20,000 viewers simultaneously, with a grand total of, like, 650,000 live viewers of this puddle. And it wasn't that we were watching a puddle. It was that we were watching a puddle together. Like, "Isn't this crazy? We're actually watching this puddle."
Were you watching the puddle?
I was watching the puddle. It wasn't even the people in the puddle or what they were doing. It was the fact that I was watching with other people, and I was connected to the audience, and I could actually talk with them, and I could say, "Isn't this ridiculous? We're watching a puddle." And then: "Oh, is that woman going to walk around it? Is she going to get wet? Like, what's going to happen?" And it was just so cool to see how this little tiny thing became an event. But that's been our history for 10 years. It's a lot of the same idea.
So in the future, I think we can continue to augment reality in a very interesting way, in that it provides a conversation around anything that's happening in the world.
But I think our No. 1 value that we bring to any live event is speed and the quickness of our delivery of information and insight and entertainment. We can even get predictive about what's going to happen. Like, you open up your weather app on your phone, and you see the present, you see what's happening now right outside. What's interesting about weather apps is they also show you a little bit of a glimpse into the future. It may or may not happen, but they show you what to prepare for your day.
Twitter can be distilled down to that simplicity of, "Here's what's going to happen in the world. Here's what's happening right now. Here's what's going to happen in the world." And the more we can identify those unique voices in real time and connect people, the more potential we have to show something really interesting that will unfold.
How important is it to capture and to keep influencers and celebrities, who seem to be migrating to these more visual platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat?
I think independent of the visual medium, text always has a place in the world. I don't think that's ever going away. As we talk about these shifts toward visual, I think it is important to remember that the written word is always going to be something that's important and useful.
We certainly benefit a lot from our creators and influencers and what they bring to us, but what's really interesting is just finding those new voices, as well, and emerging that new talent. And we've seen that happen again and again, certainly on Twitter, a lot of it where the journalists and comedians and sports commentators and whatnot who are finding and amplifying their voice on Twitter.
But also, we saw it with Vine, and we're seeing it with Periscope, as well, emergent new talent that is a really interesting mix to the “premium,” or “celebrity,” or “head content” that I think people focus a lot of their energy on. But the audience right now is looking for new—new, new, new, new, new—and looking for differentiated and unique voices. And we often see that they start on Twitter.
