Joi Ito/Flickr Kevin Thau, former Biz Dev VP at Twitter and Jelly’s new chief operating officer.

Kevin Thau — the man who led Twitter’s Music app project from acquisition to completion — has left the building.

Thau leaves Twitter to become chief operating officer of Jelly, the mystery startup created by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, according to sources familiar with the matter.

News of Thau’s departure comes not more than a week after Twitter Music launched nationwide on “Good Morning America.” The app helps users to discover new music based on the trending listening habits of people using the app across Twitter.

Thau has been with the project since day one, and was a Twitter employee for much longer than that (employee No. 20 at the company, I believe). Thau was the biz dev guy who found We Are Hunted, the small team whose app Twitter acquired and which would eventually become Twitter Music.

Previous to this, Thau managed Twitter’s mobile engineering and design teams responsible for launching the first versions of Twitter’s mobile applications. From there, Thau became VP of business and corp development, where he worked to integrate Twitter into BlackBerry and Apple’s software platforms.

As my colleague Peter Kafka reported previously, during Twitter Music’s entire development process, the whole team (including Thau) was sequestered away from Twitter HQ in a sort of “skunkworks” project off-site. Thus, Thau and company haven’t been working on what much of the main Twitter product teams are currently working on.

It’s the third in a series of relatively recent Twitter employee departures for Stone’s new, yet-to-be-fully-explained startup. Earlier in the year, Vítor Lourenço left Twitter, and is now acting as a consultant to the Jelly team; earlier this week, Stone himself introduced former Twitter employee Ben Finkel as Jelly’s new CTO.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

According to sources, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is close to launching a new startup called Jelly, which one person called a “native mobile” effort.

While it’s not clear exactly what that means, sources said the well-known entrepreneur has already hired four or five employees to form a team on the mystery product that will likely be aimed at smartphones and tablets.

It’s an interesting move, since Stone is also running a small incubator called Obvious with one of his Twitter co-founders, Ev Williams. They left their daily roles at the high-profile microblogging service to create Obvious, which has startups such as Lift, Branch and Medium in its portfolio.

There has been low-level chatter in Silicon Valley about Stone’s startup, which some have taken to mean he is no longer working as much with Williams at Obvious. But sources said that is not the case and both are involved in helping their small group of startups.

That said, Williams has been focusing more on Medium, an effort to rejigger blogging and content platforms. Meanwhile, another Obvious principal, Jason Goldman, has been focused on Branch, an online conversation-focused site.

Presumably, Obvious will invest in Jelly, but that’s not clear.

The community bulletin board is not a new idea. As long as communities have existed, we’ve congregated around shared spots, trading ideas and figuring out ways to make locals work together for the betterment of all.

At least, that’s the ideal. Obviously, communities are much larger than they were when they first existed. And as groups grew into villages, towns and eventually cities, we’ve needed to cope with size by creating different, better ways to communicate.

That’s the intent of Neighborland, a socially-focused site with a fairly simple goal: Helping community residents make their city better. It launched its latest iteration this week, giving its design an overall visual refresh along with a new “actions” feature.

The site isn’t complicated, essentially a rethink of the local message board. Users sign up and specify where they live, and they’re thrust into small vertical forums based on their location. You’re asked a simple question: “What do you want in your neighborhood?” From there, in theory, you’ll be able to foster discussion between other locals with the aim of making something happen.

“We’re trying to find the signal through all of the noise,” Neighborland CEO and founder Dan Parham told me. While websites like bulletin board services and email chains have been around since the early days of the Internet, Parham thinks there’s a better way to foster communication between citizens outside of the cluttered interfaces that already exist.

Parham also encourages old-school offline tactics of community development; part of Neighborland’s quirky pitch is the distribution of “I want” stickers, spray-chalking messages on the sidewalk, and big green signs, all meant to express the community’s hopes. Sticking your wish for a new coffee shop on a dilapidated building, for instance, could inspire others far more than, say, a mess of graffiti.

Neighborland came about a couple years ago, after Parham read a profile of Biz Stone and Evan Williams in the New York Times. In that piece, the Twitter co-founders announced their new company, Obvious Corp., along with former Twitter VP of product Jason Goldman, with an aim to help entrepreneurs who have larger, more altruistic aspirations than creating the hottest new dating app. Parham got in touch with Obvious shortly thereafter, and the group has worked together ever since.

“When neighbors can collectively discuss issues, propose ideas, and unite to have their voices heard, there is virtually nothing they cannot achieve to improve their communities,” said Biz Stone in a statement.

Working with Obvious helped Parham gain traction with other VC firms, and Neighborland also took investments from others, including True Ventures, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel and CrunchFund.

Something to note here; Right now, local is a crowded space. Neighborland has some similarities with Nextdoor, another local social network that aims to better connect users who live next to one another, in tight, cordoned-off communities.

Parham said he’s impressed with what Nextdoor is doing, though he thinks that its focus is more on privacy and safety issues, while Neighborland is about broader themes among disparate communities. Also, Nextdoor has a very strict policy around identity and sharing, only allowing people to communicate with one another if they live in the same immediate area. That’s not the case with Neighborland.

Neighborland’s new look is up and running, available to new and existing users on the website.

Obvious Corp. is the brainchild of Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the two Twitter co-founders who left their daily roles at the microblogging service to re-form their small incubator, which is now also home to startups like Branch.

Hansen will work specifically on Medium, the pet project of Williams and Stone, which aims to re-think blogging and content platforms.

“Our goal is to create new publishing tools and a new kind of content platform that encourages and rewards high quality writing — not just the lastest post at the top of the feed,” Hansen wrote in an email to friends and colleagues on Thursday.

Hansen was editor in chief at Wired.com for more than seven years, and previously was a section editor at CNET news. (Disclosure: Hansen was also my boss when I wrote for Wired before working here at AllThingsD.)

Hansen’s move is one in a string of recent migrations by journalists into the startup space. New York Times editor David F. Gallagher left the paper to go to Kickstarter earlier this year. And last year saw CNET’s long-time writer Rafe Needleman land at Evernote in a sort of evangelist position, with the intent to expand Evernote’s platform and work with developers.

Hansen will also work to expand platform, though from an editorial standpoint. “I’ll be in charge of developing editorial out of San Francisco with a focus on technology, science and business,” he wrote. “After years handling business, admin and tech problems, it feels great to get back to writing and editing.”

Update 4:50 pm PST: Post amended to correct Hansen’s title, which is senior editor, charged with leading coverage of technology and science.

On Wednesday, Twitter will give users another reason to cringe: The company will allow you to download your entire history of tweets from the moment you started using the service.

I’d venture to guess that the majority of Twitter users won’t have massive files to comb through, as the company has stated that the average user consumes more tweets than he or she writes.

But for the power users out there (like myself), there are six years of messages to browse. Twitter kindly makes it easier for the high-volume tweeters; you’re able to browse through by month, or search your archive by keywords, hashtags or specific usernames.

Philosophically, it’s a significant milestone for Twitter. For years, the company has taken the stance that users own their tweeted speech, and thus should be able to download and possess it as such. (The timing couldn’t be better, either, as Facebook and Instagram face a backlash from users who feel like their life photos are being commoditized and sold.)

Though, honestly, once you get the ability to do so, take a look at your early tweets. It’s horrifying. My first year of tweets was a mess of sound and fury, spit out into the void by an idiot, signifying nothing.

At the same time, it shouldn’t be surprising. Every service has a learning curve. Even Twitter’s founders — Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey — wrote many awful tweets (by today’s lofty standards) in the early days. It’s like learning to crawl before you can walk; everyone goes through that phase of tweeting what they had for breakfast. Looking back is embarrassing, yes. But I liken it to opening up my high school yearbook — it’s supposed to be a little cringe-worthy.

Want to experience true horror? Go look at your first Facebook messages from 2004.

Today on Tumblr, Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey clarified a story in the New York Times that seemed to imply that he had been sidelined from a more active role at the company.

Among the issues raised by the piece, which was in a longer profile of CEO Dick Costolo, was that Dorsey was “difficult to work with.”

Wrote the Times’ Nick Bilton:

“Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions.”

Dorsey had taken a larger role in the social communications company after its other founders, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, were, well, kind of sidelined several years ago. Dorsey, in turn, had been frozen out of the San Francisco company by them previous to that.

Got it? Well, according to Dorsey, this is not so much a geek version of “Dynasty” as it is business as usual.

“We haven’t talked about this publicly because it’s not what people using Twitter every day care about,” he noted, explaining he was brought in to help for a spell, and now is back to focusing on his other company, the white-hot payments start-up Square, where he is CEO. Dorsey remains Twitter’s chairman, too.

It’s a lot of inside baseball, of course, but still interesting.

Here’s Dorsey’s full post:

There was a great profile in the New York Times about Twitter’s CEO, Dick Costolo, which mentioned my work at the company. It’s not a common arrangement, so I’d like to clarify a few points.

In Spring of 2011, Dick asked me to take an operational role overseeing product, design, and brand. Our shared goal was to get those organizations back under him as soon as possible, simply because it was the right thing to do for the company. We moved all of my reports back under him in January of this year after leadership was firmly in place. This allowed me to focus on refining our brand and logo, to work more with Dick and the leadership team on our direction forward, and ultimately return the majority of my time to Square, where I’m CEO. I’m back to going to Twitter on Tuesday afternoons, something I started before taking the interim operational role.

We haven’t talked about this publicly because it’s not what people using Twitter every day care about.

I’m fortunate in life to be a part of two foundational and mission-driven organizations, and I’m always going fight like hell to make them thrive. And they are! Now back to our work.

But that will change after the first of the new year, Williams said, when the lightweight publishing site becomes more widely available to the public.

Williams, who now runs Obvious Corporation with Stone, took a few minutes to chat last night after an event in New York City, where he sat on a panel with BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and Josh Miller, the founder of another Obvious-backed company called Branch.

The trio touched upon varying aspects of the future of digital content production and distribution, topics that would probably be boring to normal folk but enthralled the who’s-who of New York’s tech and digital media scene.

A few key points: Williams would like to keep Medium relatively high-quality, though he recognizes that, in publishing, low barriers to entry feed the content machine by making people feel good, thus spurring them to share more content (Instagram, Williams noted, is a key example of this). Also, he believes more and more media consumption will come via networks and platforms instead of individual websites.

“If you’re a Web publisher, you’re primarily paying attention to page views,” he said. “But whether people are actually reading your stuff, whether they’re on the page for five seconds or five minutes, is something we’re looking to measure.”

Williams also said that he believes valuable content can come “from anyone” — though, at the moment, not just anyone can fully access the site.

Williams later said that Medium — aptly described by my AllThingsD colleague Liz Gannes, following its launch last month, as a “collaborative publishing platform” — would open to the public sometime next year, and that despite its singularly-focused branding, would be open to media beyond blogs and texts, including videos and photos.

Medium will use basic Web algorithms that push popular stories up the content pile, Williams said, much in the way Google works. So highest-rated posts will appear at the top of the Web page, while the rest tile down.

“So much of Twitter’s value comes from real time,” Williams said during the panel. “I just think there’s room for other things.”

And one of the top director candidates is well-regarded Hollywood exec Peter Chernin, said several sources.

He is an obvious choice, having been a top exec at News Corp. for many years. Since he left in mid-2009, Chernin has forged a successful film and television career, producing such hits as “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” and “New Girl.”

But, unlike many media execs, he has also focused on garnering much deeper digital experience.

Chernin was key to the formation of the Hulu premium online service, for example, and is also a board member of the Pandora streaming music service. He has also been making digital and media investments in Asia.

(And, interestingly, although apropos of nothing, Chernin’s former boss, Rupert Murdoch, has become an avid tweeter, too.)

Sources said Chernin has not decided if he even wants such a board seat, and Twitter management is still only in the early stages of its board effort, presumably to replace Flipboard’s Mike McCue.

The entrepreneur left the board earlier this year, after it was clear that his social media app and Twitter were on a collision course (or an acquisition one, depending how you looked at it).

But the addition of a media-savvy director — or even two — also makes sense in the context of the past year of Twitter’s evolution.

The brainchild of Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Twitter first began as a microblogging social network.

While it did attract a lot of attention due to its celebrity tweeters — such as actor Ashton Kutcher and famebot Kim Kardashian — the management and board of Twitter is largely tech-centric in experience.

But, more recently, the service has taken its shape as a consumption-based media company, where some 40 percent of its user base read and consume content rather than create it. That is to say, they watch, but they don’t tweet.

Such a strategic direction is a natural extension for bringing in more advertising spending from outside partners, especially big media companies that have both the eyeballs and dollars that the company is hoping to attract.

Twitter is now commonly used throughout the media space in a variety of roles, from branding to audience-gauging, and also sometimes even as a plot device.

(That said, you won’t catch CEO Dick Costolo outright admitting Twitter’s media-company status; he still wants the Silicon Valley cred of being valued as a technology giant first.)

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on any effort to bring in new directors; Chernin has not yet responded to a query for comment.

While we watch and wait for Mayer’s next move, Biz Stone has an idea for the newly crowned CEO: Pack up and head East.

The Twitter co-founder suggested in a blog post on Friday that above all else, a cross-country HQ relocation could provide the shake-up the stagnating company needs.

“Compared to newer powerhouse social and search giants in Silicon Valley, Yahoo seems faded and out of place,” Stone wrote. “The bold act of picking up and moving to New York City could cast Yahoo in the completely different light of a comparatively nascent and powerful player in the media capital of the world.”

It’s a flight of fancy that isn’t entirely pie-in-the-sky — every other week you’ll hear yet another story on the state of the burgeoning NYC tech scene. To boot, points out Stone, Mayer already sits on the board of both the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and of the New York City Ballet, and is apparently interested in fashion (Project Runway, anyone?). It’s a natural fit!

One minor quibble: While Yahoo has cast itself as a media company in administrations past — see interim CEO (and now ex-Yahoo) Ross Levinsohn’s area of expertise, for one — Mayer’s background and experience at Google suggest a product emphasis going forward. A move to New York, the so-called media capital of the world, may have made sense under Levinsohn. Mayer? Not so much.

But it’s Friday! The perfect time for throwing out ideas of what CEOs of faltering companies should do next.

Keep ’em coming, Biz.

According to the new iPhone app Lift, they are: Setting goals, recording activity, getting support and seeing progress.

That’s all Lift users can do. It’s really one of the most basic apps I have ever seen. Don’t go looking for the prizes or the medal stand, because they’re not there.

Lift allows you to join or create a “habit,” click a big button once a day if you’ve met your goal, and give and receive props to other users. All activity is public.

If your goal is something vague like “exercise” — currently the most popular among beta testers — you can add more detail in writing, like “ran five miles.”

After some time spent tracking the goal, users’ gray personal frequency chart starts to fill up with green bars. Except for that one thing, the app is almost colorless.

Lift has been in development for more than a year, and co-founder Tony Stubblebine told me in May that much of that time was spent stripping away features that his team assumed were necessary. Previous versions had points, badges and levels. Now those are all gone.

“People have an unquenchable desire to pursue their better selves,” Stubblebine writes today. “Real life progress is more motivating than a game.”

Stubblebine now describes Lift as “a portable support community.”

One of the reasons people are paying particular attention to Lift is that the small, four-person, San Francisco-based company is backed and incubated by Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone’s Obvious incubator. Williams and Stone recently previewed their next project, a collaborative publishing platform called Medium.

The launch is particularly notable given the Obvious team’s storied history of providing the world with new publishing platforms, first Blogger and then Twitter.

Williams writes today, “Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others.”

Medium has various types of posts including text and pictures, which are grouped into collections that multiple people can add to.

Rather than being organized chronologically, the highest-rated posts are at the top, and the rest tile down.

Obviously this is meatier than can be addressed in a quick take, but starting today people can look at Medium for themselves and give superlatives like “This is good,” “This is helpful” and “Nice work!” which contribute to a scoring system.

Only a limited group of users can publish new content.

Stone added in a separate post that Medium wants to be sort of networked publishing. “Much of our vision for Medium is just that—vision,” he wrote. “Our ideas are much farther along than our product. Medium is only a sliver of what it could be.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, who is now working on a new venture called Obvious, is taking some spare time to hang out with turkeys.

Stone, a well-known vegan, will be the special guest for the Orland, Calif., “Celebration FOR the Turkeys” next Saturday, which is being thrown by Farm Sanctuary.

According to its Web site, “Farm Sanctuary was founded in 1986 to combat the abuses of factory farming and to encourage a new awareness and understanding about ‘farm animals.’ At Farm Sanctuary, these animals are our friends, not our food.”

Thus, bird-lover Stone will lend his help to the laudable organization he has been supporting for a decade — as someone who loves turkeys, he says in the video, “just not to eat them.”

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Stone, who left day-to-day operations at the microblogging service in June but is still an adviser, discusses teaching creativity and entrepreneurship. (Mr. Stone will serve as an Executive Fellow at the Haas School for one year.)

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Whether or not to sell any of their shares in Twitter is the big decision facing stakeholders of the microblogging service right now, as the second $400 million part of the company’s recent funding by Russia’s DST Global is completed in the next several weeks.

That includes everyone from early angel investors to those who bought it on the secondary markets to Twitter’s 600 employees, all of whom can sell a portion — up to 20 percent, sources said — of their holdings.

It’s all part of a recent $800 million mega-funding by Twitter, valuing the San Francisco company at $8.4 billion.

While $400 million went to Twitter, the second tranche of $400 million of the total was targeted to cash out current investors and also employees of the company.

Current investors include Benchmark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital and several other venture firms, as well as a spate of prominent angel investors, such as Ron Conway.

Whether DST — as well as other smaller buyers, including early Twitter investor Chris Sacca and T. Rowe Price, according to the tender offer — gets them and others to sell enough shares is the big question, especially since few want to get caught in what one shareholder called the “Facebook idiot box.”

That would be referring to those who sold their investments in Facebook two years ago, when the social networking giant allowed its employees to sell 20 percent of their stakes to DST.

The financing was part of a $100 million add-on to a $200 million investment in the social networking company by the aggressive Russian investor.

At the time, the tender offer valued Facebook at $6.5 billion for the common stock, or $14.77 a share.

Of course, Facebook is worth upward of more than 10 times that now. Oops!

That’s why high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, for example, is not selling out any of the shares it bought earlier this year in an $80 million transaction in private secondary markets.

Reasons to sell, of course, are also compelling.

Some investors might want to lock in upside, especially if they think the latest valuation is too high.

For venture capitalists in the company, some might want to return a win to their limited partners, while Twitter employees might want to put a down payment on a house after years of toiling in the start-up.

Others might also be worried about Twitter’s prospects going forward and might determine that the recent round was the high point of its market value. Twitter has indeed struggled to find a sustainable and lucrative business model, focused on advertising.

In addition, although it has recently stabilized, others might worry about Twitter’s management changes over the last year, as co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams have departed. Twitter creator and other co-founder Jack Dorsey is now running the company’s product efforts, with CEO Dick Costolo (who looks a lot like that Woody Allen shot above from the classic movie, “Take the Money and Run”).

Then again, that was exactly the take on Facebook several years ago, so it is now a case on all sides of seller beware.

Twitter declined to comment and I have not heard back yet from DST about the status of the transaction.

According to LinkedIn, 87 of the 641 people who say they currently work at Twitter were formerly employed by Google. (Twitter said this week that it has 600 employees, so that number’s a bit off, but probably in the general neighborhood.)

Early Google employees don’t get as much credit as those of, say, PayPal, for founding and funding a new generation of start-ups. But former Googlers seem to have made a practice of infiltrating promising new tech companies as they look for the next big thing.

At one point last year, it was noted that 200 former Googlers worked at Facebook, making up 12.5 percent of its staff at the time, including top executives like Sheryl Sandberg and many of the product people Facebook brought in through acquisitions.

Something similar seems to be happening at Twitter, though it’s still much smaller. CEO Dick Costolo was with Google after it acquired his start-up FeedBurner (but some say that means he’s not truly born-and-bred Google). Co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone (both no longer in operational roles) were also formerly at Google, though again, Williams came in through an acquisition (of his Pyra Labs, which made Blogger).

The Google influence seems especially prevalent on Twitter’s product team. Satya Patel, who is director of product management, was formerly a well-respected Googler, and nearly every Twitter product manager seems to have had some history at the Plex — save for the four who were recently let go.

Twitter creative director Doug Bowman came from Google (in fact, he left in a huff), as did general counsel Alex Macgillivray and VP Katie Jacobs Stanton, who leads international strategy.

Glenn Otis Brown, Twitter’s newly added director of business development for media, was formerly products counsel at Google and head of music partnerships at YouTube.

Twitter spokeswoman Carolyn Penner, who herself came to Twitter from Google, said she could not provide any specific numbers about how many of her coworkers matched that description.

A Twitter insider said that Twitter’s Googliness is less apparent than Facebook’s, because fewer members of the core leadership team came from Google. Even if head honcho Costolo did stop through Mountain View en route to hipper San Francisco, execs Jack Dorsey (executive chairman in charge of product), Adam Bain (revenue), Ali Rowghani (CFO) and Michael Abbott (engineering) did not work at Google.

Google isn’t entirely happy to be spawning other people’s workforces. The company has famously paid dearly to keep its top employees from departing to take roles at Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. Twitter and Google have been partners in the past, but more recently have had testy relations over renegotiating a data distribution deal.

Thomas Korte, the ringleader of start-up incubator AngelPad and an early Googler, noted in a recent conversation that following former Googlers’ successful infiltration of Twitter, Square and Foursquare seem likely to be the next ex-Googler targets.

Korte pointed out that Foursquare recently hired the well-connected and respected former Googlers Morgan Missen and Benjy Weinberger (both actually worked at Twitter en route!) and Square recently appointed former Googler Megan Quinn as its director of products.

Besides the beginnings of strong referral networks, Korte added, these up-and-coming companies have one other thing going for them: “They’re the only ones that can cough up the salaries to match Google,” he said.

Stone, a Twitter co-founder with the most longevity of anyone at the social media company, has left his full-time role there — where he led corporate culture efforts and was the go-to guy to joke about Twitter on late-night talk shows.

Stone said in a personal blog post today that he was relaunching Obvious Corporation, the incubator that shepherded Twitter out of the podcasting start-up Odeo and into an independent company.

Joining him to relaunch Obvious are familiar faces Williams — also a Twitter co-founder and its former CEO — and Goldman — former head of product at Twitter.

Just a year ago, these three were at the core of Twitter’s executive team, but the company is now led by CEO Dick Costolo.

Here’s an explanation from the relaunched Obvious.com:

Why are you doing this?
We are passionate about identifying problems that people can help solve through innovation on the Internet, and we enjoy collaborating on solutions.

What are you building?
We’re are not ready to discuss specifics except to say that our thesis is building systems that help people work together to improve their lives and the world.

Meanwhile, the third official Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, who had previously left the company during a leadership shake-up with Williams in 2008, this year returned to lead product at Twitter, where he is executive chairman, though he is still CEO of his other start-up Square. Dorsey filled a role that had been vacant since Goldman left late last year.

10:46 am: Greetings! Joining a minute late. Walt and Costolo are talking about DARPA planes.

10:47 am: Walt asks about new Pew study saying 13 percent of U.S. adults are on Twitter, up from 8 percent.

Costolo: No third party measures Twitter accurately. We get 13 billion API requests a day. Those go out to third- party clients, etc. We don’t even track where all of those off-network Tweets go. What we do see internally is that we’re growing “much, much faster” than that.

More stats: Mobile usage is up 150 percent since the beginning of the year. It took three years to send the first billion tweets. Now we do a billion tweets every six days.

“We’re growing like a weed.”

10:49 am: Walt: Well, how many Americans are using Twitter?

Costolo: We’re not sharing that number.

10:49 am: Walt: Let’s talk about on- and off-site usage.

Costolo: The majority of use is not on the Twitter.com Web site. We’re seeing dramatic growth in Twitter for iPhone, Blackberry, Android.

10:51 am: Walt: You’ve been buying clients and/or discouraging some developers from building clients, right?

Costolo: We’re encouraging developers to move up the value chain. Today there are 600,000 developers who’ve downloaded 900,000 API keys. There are thousands of Twitter clients. Meanwhile, more and more brands–Virgin America, WSJ, Martha Stewart–are flocking to Twitter. They need all these value-added services, and we want more companies providing those.

10:52 am: Walt: Like what?

10:52 am: Like Radian 6, which provides analytics. Curation: Tweetriver helped E! filter the best tweets to show on screen during the Oscars. Klout, etc. And our point was there are already hundreds of basic clients. We’re encouraging people to build other services. Also, “we’re going to hold you to a higher bar” if you build a client, because people are signing on to you thinking they’re using a Twitter product.

10:54 am: Walt: And now you’re buying some of these guys.

10:54 am: We bought Tweetie a year ago. And we just bought Tweetdeck. We bought Tweetdeck because every newsroom uses Tweetdeck, because it provides amazing research capabilities. Lesley Stahl’s producer told me he was using it last night.

10:55 am: Walt: So should people using your API feel you’re competing with them? What does that say about your bond with them?

Costolo: We have lots of developers. We’re going to have some overlap. We try to signal where we’re going, when we can, so it gives you room, to move up the value chain.

10:56 am: Walt: So no damage at all? No broken trust? And now you’re going to do another competing service, right? Cue video demo.

[To a musical soundtrack, nice-looking young people taking photos with their iPhone, uploading them to Twitter. They show up on some kind of archival page.

Photos, videos, sorted by hashtag on Twitter.com.

I should know who's singing, because I saw him on Jimmy Kimmel a while back. He has red hair and looks a bit fey. See the YouTube video embedded below.]

OK, time to explain what we saw.

10:59 am: Costolo: OK, we now have “Twitter native photo-sharing experience.” “That’s what it’s called, I just named it that now.” Rolling out over the next couple weeks.

We’re doing it to “remove friction” from the photo-sharing experience.

11:00 am: Walt: Is it really hard to add photos to Twitter?

11:00 am: Costolo: Remember that we have a big user base. Also realize that other third-party clients may have different rights than users expect. For instance, with our service, “users will own their own rights to their photos.”

Also, we’ve dramatically improved search on Twitter. Now doing “relevance-sorted results.”

And we’ll do a better job of surfacing all of the context surrounding Tweets in search results.

11:02 am: Walt: So photo stays with the Tweet, right?

11:02 am: Costolo: Yes, it’s part of the metadata.

11:03 am: Walt: And there will be a repository of photos, right?

Costolo: Yep. But not all of your photos, just some, surfaced via algorithm.

11:03 am: Walt: This puts you in more direct competition with Facebook, which is a big photo-sharing service, right?

Costolo: No. Twitter photos are shared in a moment and conversed upon, by lots of people, as it happens, in real time. Facebook is more of an archive of past moments. Like I just said, we’re not going to have an archive of every one of your photos. [Note: Twitter PR tells us photos will actually be hosted via Photobucket.]

[Meanwhile, here's Twitter's description of the product.]

11:06 am: Walt: So what will Yfrog and Twitpic think about this?

Costolo: Like I said, there will be overlap. We encourage services to move up the value chain.

11:07 am: Walt: Will you be on all platforms? webOS?

Costolo: No webOS yet. The beauty of Twitter is that it already works on everybody’s device. It works on SMS. You can get Twitter on your phone without even signing up for the service.

11:08 am: Walt: SMS is interesting. Years ago you seemed to stress that much more than you do now.

Costolo: In some cases, services like push notifications are replacing SMS. But for lots of people, and in lots of countries, SMS is crucial. In Haiti, 95 percent of use is SMS.

11:09 am: Walt: Eric Schmidt says Google blew it with regard to identity. Do you agree?

Costolo: I don’t know about Google. In any case, we don’t think about the social graph, we think about the interest graph. It’s a very very different way to think about identity, where I can follow you but you don’t follow me. Or I follow the San Francisco Giants and they don’t follow me.

11:11 am: Walt: So what else can you do with that? Is there an analog to Facebook Connect?

Costolo: Yes, like the new “follow button” we launched yesterday. The “@username” is a powerful construct. You give out lots of information without sacrificing privacy.

11:12 am: Eric Schmidt did not include you in the “gang of four.” How do you feel?

Costolo: “Gang of five” doesn’t sound good, does it? Though he could have called us the “Fab Five.” Also, Reed Hastings didn’t make the cut, and he’s doing pretty good. Also, 20 years ago, in 1991, the gang of four had four different players. So things evolve.

[Sorry, locked out for a second]

11:15 am: Walt: Are you a business?

Costolo: Yes. We’re a remarkably successful business. Over 80 percent of advertisers renew with us. That’s an objective fact.

Costolo using same metrics he’s used in the past to describe Twitter ads: Engagement rates are “orders of magnitude higher” than traditional Web ads.

Their Volvo ad, for instance, had a 50 percent engagement rate.

A Radio Shack promotion ran for one day on Twitter. In the next three days, in-store exchanges and purchases were up double-digits from the day before the ad ran. And the ad didn’t run anywhere else. “These are amazing statistics that marketers just can’t believe when they first hear them…So the business is working phenomenally well.”

11:18 am:Walt: Profitable?

Costollo: Not gonna talk about it.

11:18 am: Walt trying to goad Costolo to talk about money. Dick’s sphinx face remains strong. He’s not gonna talk about it.

[And now a brief digression about DARPA]

11:19 am: Back to business: Middle of last year, we said we’d have 100 advertisers by the end of the year. We ended up with 150 advertisers. Now we’re up to 600. “We’re in no hurry to go make sure [that we jam Twitter up with ads]. It just doesn’t make sense.”

We’re shrinking the world. It used to be that just a few people saw your photo. Now many do. We helped people in Tunisia broadcast what was happening, and they could hear people around the world supporting them.

Another example: During the Google I/O conference, Google sold $55,000 worth of tickets in a few minutes.

“We don’t need to optimize for near term revenue.”

11:22 am: Walt: When are you going public?

Costolo: Reid Hoffman and I were both in coach yesterday, by the way. On IPOs in general–those will all cause media to ask us about when we’ll IPO. The long-term success of the company is not correlated with the success of the IPO. Big IPOs have nothing to do with success of the business.

Q&A:

11:24 am: Q: Is there a value on specific Twitter handles? Can you see a market for specific names?

A: I assume that kind of stuff is already happening without our knowledge [True! I gave away @fakedondraper to a nice person last year.]

Also, we’re working with Mozilla, a Firefox add-on, that brings you to Twitter as soon as you type in an “@name” or a hashtag. We love that people are using @s and #s.

I assume that will mean that markets, “black, grey or otherwise,” will show up around this stuff.

Q: Users own their Tweets. And they own their photos. But please explain (asks Josh Topolsky): Why don’t I have access to old tweets via search?

A: We have amazing search engineers. Rocket science PhDs. And we have the full archive of Tweets. But we have to choose between real-time search and super-fast archive search. We’ve decided to focus on real-time. “Right now it goes as far back as we feel we can rapidly surface real-time results.” But it will go farther and farther back.

We only have 500 people at the company. It’s a resource constraint.

Q: Can you comment on Rep. Weiner’s hacking case?

A: “Commenting on the specific case is an IQ test.” In general, we want users to create strong passwords.

Q: Long soliloquy.

A: Marshall McLuhan quote.

Also: Twitter is to communication as David Blaine close-up magic is to old-timey magicians, far away on a stage. [This sort of makes sense if you hear it in real time. We'll get video.]

All done! Thanks for reading.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo-live-at-d9/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110415/biz-barks-back-at-fortunes-twitter-bashing-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20110415/biz-barks-back-at-fortunes-twitter-bashing-sort-of/#comments Fri, 15 Apr 2011 13:35:18 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=42695

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone took time off from his myriad of witty talk show appearances to slap around a just-published Fortune cover story that was titled–get it?–“Trouble@ Twitter.”

Wrote Stone, in part, on his personal blog in a post titled “The Trouble Bubble”:

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

He correctly points out Fortune’s reliable proclivity–see Google, Facebook–to write a wildly positive piece about the latest tech phenom, followed by a smackdown, followed by a they’re-back! tome.

Now, it is the San Francisco microblogging company’s turn.

(In Fortune’s defense, you try selling a magazine these days without a hookish cover line! Hence, the hit-you-over-the-head wounded bird motif here.)

But vegan-y, nice dude that he is, Stone ends on a positive note:

“For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.”

While it must be pointed out that Rocky suffered from brain damage in the last installment of the famed movie franchise, BoomTown awards a Stone-cold win for Mr. Biz-boa!

Here’s the full post:

The Trouble Bubble

We founded Twitter, Inc. in March of 2007 and while we have long said it’s about the users, not the service, we have nevertheless enjoyed favorable media coverage. What took so long for somebody to write the article that says we are falling apart? The normal press cycle is to put a company on a pedestal and then knock it down. It’s much more interesting that way. Twitter has had so many ups and downs you’d think we would have had more negative press. To me, it’s like watching the movie Rocky–he’s up, he’s down, he’s out, he wins!

Fortune magazine finally stepped up to knock us down with a cover article, “Trouble@Twitter.” Here are some examples of how this works. After mostly positive coverage of Facebook, Fortune finally published an article in April of 2009 titled, “Is Facebook Losing Its Glow?” However, later that year they published, “What Backlash? Facebook Is Growing Like Mad.” Google received similar treatment. In July 2010 Fortune published, “Google, The Search Party Is Over.” Later that year, they published, “Google Continues To Gain Search Marketshare.”

We’ve had lots of positive press from Fortune in the past. In July of 2010 they published an article titled, “Twitter’s Business Model: A Visionary Experiment.” The article ended with, “Facebook might want to take notes.” It may seem odd, but from my perspective, this means we are being taken very seriously. Twitter is an important company and it’s under scrutiny from journalists–this is exactly how it’s supposed to work. Now it’s our job to prove the reporters wrong so they can write an article later about how we have made dramatic progress.

The Twitter team is an incredibly dedicated group of people who truly believe they are doing the most meaningful work of their lives. It’s also a very small group of people when compared to the other companies Fortune is investigating. We still have under 500 employees–many of them working weekends and nights to fulfill a potential that is palpable. For a long time, we refused to hire a communications group and now that we have one, I’m having fun teasing them about this Fortune article but the truth is, we’re long overdue to be knocked down by the press.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110415/biz-barks-back-at-fortunes-twitter-bashing-sort-of/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20110412/no-first-birthday-party-for-twitters-chirp-conference-this-year/ http://allthingsd.com/20110412/no-first-birthday-party-for-twitters-chirp-conference-this-year/#comments Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:25:40 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=5455 One year ago this week, Twitter held its first developer conference, Chirp, a glossy multiday event put on at picturesque venues on San Francisco Bay with an afterparty DJed by will.i.am.

Twitter has not scheduled Chirp 2.0, said spokesman Sean Garrett, but it does hope to host such an event at some point. In the meantime, the company is planning smaller developer gatherings, he said, adding that Twitter is “going to do more low-key stuff before we go big again.”

Chirp 2010 was perhaps a premature commitment by Twitter to grow up and become a business, laying out various revenue models and developer road maps.

At the time, Twitter was on shaky footing with its developers, having announced in the days prior to the conference that it was buying Atebits, maker of Tweetie, the leading Twitter client for the iPhone.

Amidst claims of betrayal, Twitter tried to make the best of the situation by engaging with critics and welcoming developers under its wing. It was sometimes awkward, but not unsuccessful.

Things are much different a year later. Dick Costolo, who played a supporting role at the event by walking through the company’s “@anywhere” publisher tools, is now CEO. Jack Dorsey, who was then absent, is back at the company leading product.

Featured speakers Evan Williams and Jason Goldman, then CEO and head of product, are no longer working at the company on a day-to-day business.

The most consistent players in the line-up are Biz Stone and Ryan Sarver, who have maintained their roles as Chief Late-Night Talk Show Guest and Bearer of (Often Bad) News to Developers.

One thing that hasn’t happened in the last year is a big business being built from the ground up on Twitter’s platform, like Zynga on Facebook. The most successful outcome for a Twitter-related business to date was probably Salesforce.com’s $326 million purchase of social media monitoring company Radian6 in March.

Meanwhile, Facebook also has yet to announce a date for its developer conference, known as f8, which was held in April last year, too. That event has been mostly annual, but somewhat irregularly scheduled. A representative for the company said f8 2011 is definitely happening, but didn’t offer a date.

Consumer Web heavyweight Google is much more on the ball, and sold out registration to its May I/O conference months ago.

Photo of will.i.am at the Chirp party courtesy of Flickr user d.mosher.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110412/no-first-birthday-party-for-twitters-chirp-conference-this-year/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20110330/how-to-get-verified-on-twitter/ http://allthingsd.com/20110330/how-to-get-verified-on-twitter/#comments Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:43:52 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31330 Twitter turned off its verification program last summer, and since then it has blessed only a handful of Very Important Person’s accounts with its “verified” badge.

But! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. At least, if you work for Twitter fan Howard Stern, who had Biz Stone on his show this morning.

Stern and his crew seem obsessed with verification, and at the end of a 45-minute interview, Stern convinced Stone to bless one of his pals, too.

Ronnie the Limo Driver will get his badge today, Stone said. As of 4:30 ET, that hasn’t happened, but then again the Twitter team has a lot on its plate right now.

If you do have the time to spare, by the way, the Stern interview is quite good: Stone goes over the basics of Twitter’s history, as well as delivering a good anecdote about not selling the company to Facebook.

But unlike the other press appearances Stone has made, this one goes away from the standard talking points, and Stern gets him to go into his personal history, too. It’s both gossipy and humanizing–the kind of stuff that people love to hear from famous people, but very seldom get.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110330/how-to-get-verified-on-twitter/feed/ 8 http://allthingsd.com/20110322/twitter-really-really-likes-tv/ http://allthingsd.com/20110322/twitter-really-really-likes-tv/#comments Tue, 22 Mar 2011 21:50:34 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=31065 Hey! It was Twitter’s fifth birthday yesterday! I remember hearing about that somewhere.

Ah–here’s one of the places I heard about it: Conan O’Brien’s newish show, where co-founder Biz Stone popped in for a chat. (O’Brien, you may have heard, is really into Twitter these days.)

Stone, who is on TV a lot, is good at it, too.

Stone’s appearances are fun, but Twitter’s real embrace of TV is happening a little bit offstage, where the company is working hard to get itself integrated into TV shows.

It’s still unclear exactly what TV can really mean for Twitter, but the company is smart to try to get itself into the industry, whose $70 billion-plus in annual revenue still makes the Web ad business look puny.

Twitter’s media blog, for instance, is touting Comedy Central’s use/promotion of the service during its kinda-unwatchable Donald Trump roast.

Comedy Central ran a Twitter hashtag on the bottom left corner for the duration of the show, prompting people to use it, which helped make the term appear on Twitter’s “trending” list, which presumably prompted more people to check out the show.

That’s a cool virtuous cycle, though I wonder if that’s a novelty that goes away. More important: Even if that strategy works long-term, how does Twitter turn Comedy Central’s use into revenue?

Still, if the Twitter team can convince the networks–and their advertisers–that Twitter helps bring more eyeballs to shows, and/or helps keep them there, then that’s going to be worth a lot, to someone. Twitter just has to figure out how to get a slice of that.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110322/twitter-really-really-likes-tv/feed/ 1