If you only have time to read a single tweet from the event, here’s the one you want:

.@dickc: “When I was your age, we didn’t have the Internet in our pants. We didn’t even have the Internet not in our pants.”

— The Michigan Daily (@michigandaily) May 4, 2013

And if you have time for two tweets, you want to see the photo the Twitter CEO took at the beginning of his speech, then Tweeted out:

Commencement @umich My view twitter.com/dickc/status/3…

— dick costolo (@dickc) May 4, 2013

But if you have 17 minutes and 13 seconds free (and let’s be honest — you do. You’re reading this. There is extra time in your life.) then you should check the whole thing out. It’s only 173 Vines worth of content, but more important, there’s great stuff here, drawing from Costolo’s attempt to break through as an improv comedian at Chicago’s famous Second City troupe. And, of course, a fail whale anecdote:

Still here? Ok! Bonus footage for you: Costolo and lots of the Michigan football team, pre-speech:

And like any company going through a growth spurt, Twitter’s organizational structure has become complicated.

The company has tried breaking into multiple departments with various leaders. But as time has passed and Twitter has scaled, roles have grown confused and inefficient, and communication between some of the departments has suffered.

This is important. Some say the company thrived in its early days from its loose-knit structure, but also suffered from a clashing of big personalities, a revolving CEO seat and defecting employees across the ranks. But as the company continues its slow, steady trudge toward going public, the Twitter of today is trying to be a different animal entirely. That means working out the kinks that still exist inside its organizational makeup, and proving to the public — and the Street — that yes, Twitter is in this for the long haul.

Making this adjustment will also mean clarifying the vision of what Twitter, the product, is, and what it is meant to be. That means faster shipping of new releases, faster decisions being made, and ultimately (hopefully), a happier user base.

To remedy the most recent issues, Twitter made significant structural changes to a number of departments earlier this month, shuffling around key managers in the hope of streamlining some of the more dysfunctional aspects of the company’s interdepartmental communication.

This is likely a good thing — or Twitter wants it to be, at least. But looking back, one thing is clear: It has been a long time coming.

Twitter, not unexpectedly, declined to comment on this story.

The Old Guard

This whole thing began nearly a year and a half ago, when CEO Dick Costolo and Chairman Jack Dorsey started cherry-picking talent from some of the Valley’s top firms. They plucked away Google engineers by the handful, recruiting hundreds of them to staff Twitter’s large engineering operations (Costolo has said more than half of Twitter is made up of engineers).

The idea back then was to restaff some of the key positions in the company with seasoned vets across the four major departments — Product, Design, Engineering and Revenue — the heads of which would report directly to Costolo.

Twitter Product VP Michael Sippey

But the old layout, as it was set up, was complicated. Former SAY Media vet Michael Sippey led as VP of consumer product development, while Othman Laraki was VP of product growth. Revenue had Adam Bain as president of global revenue, with Kevin Weil as his deputy of sorts, acting as director of revenue product. Design was led by Doug Bowman, but then Andrei Herasimchuk was promoted later to become overall director of design, while Bowman continued as creative director.

Lastly, Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to join as VP of engineering infrastructure in November of 2011, while Chris Fry was brought on in April of 2012 for another key engineering role.

So that was the lay of the land. Costolo had his lieutenants, who ideally would handle things smoothly and hand up the high-level stuff to the top. But as became evident shortly thereafter, that didn’t work out.

It’s Complicated

First of all, it’s tough to have too many cooks in the kitchen. And despite the fact that this layout seemed to be streamlined, there were too many people reporting to Costolo at any given time.

As one insider told me, “This was a mess. One year ago, Dick had four product and design reports and three engineering reports.” In other words, seven different department heads, each with Costolo’s ear.

Beyond that, there were some issues inside of a few departments that contributed to stumbles in workflow.

Design

The Design department has been dysfunctional for a long time. Earlier days saw an “overall lack of process and structure,” another person told me, and a series of new managers may have been an overcorrection, from Doug Bowman to a period with Dorsey’s heavy involvement, then to Andrei Herasimchuk after his promotion.

Design VP Mike Davidson.

Thus, Mike Davidson, a veteran designer who was founding CEO of Newsvine (acquired by NBC), was picked last autumn by Sippey and Messinger to refocus the department. There have also been a series of smaller departures inside the department, and one big one — Andrei Herasimchuk left just a week after Davidson’s appointment.

I’ve been told by multiple people that the design process has improved significantly under Davidson’s reign over the past five-plus months, and he has brought in multiple new hires from the likes of Apple, Facebook and startup PicPlum. He has also increased the department size by 30 percent since his arrival.

What remains to be seen, however, is how much Davidson will improve the output of the overall department.

Engineering

The Engineering department had its own problems. And the setup has been somewhat peculiar.

Adam Messinger was poached from Oracle to act as VP of infrastructure engineering in November of 2011. But at some point along the way, Messinger switched over from infrastructure to VP of application development — essentially a product position. That’s something of a head-scratcher, because Messinger’s background isn’t in consumer products, but infrastructure — the very thing he was hired on to do.

Twitter CTO Adam Messinger

Through all of this, Design was reporting to the Engineering department instead of acting as an independent function as it once used to.

Everything Old Is New Again

So despite Twitter’s grand organizational plan set out last year, things weren’t working out. Design reporting to Engineering just wasn’t working. Engineering leadership was muddled. Costolo had too many people to listen to in order to get things done. As one insider told me, it was “a mess.”

So as of mid-March, there’s a new New World Order at Twitter, a long-overdue “consolidation and clarity in the company,” as one source put it.

Now, according to sources, the structure has been trimmed down to a handful of go-to VPs reporting to Costolo, including Michael Sippey, Chris Fry, Kevin Weil and global revenue president Adam Bain.

Sippey is getting the biggest bump. Laraki left Twitter at the end of 2012 to work on his own thing. Sippey is now vice president of Product and Design, overseeing both departments.

Senior Vice President of Engineering Chris Fry

Fry also gets a radical step up in his responsibilities. He’s now senior vice president of overall engineering. He’ll also work closely with Alex Roetter, who is now a VP in the Engineering department, working on international, growth and revenue engineering. Kevin Weil will continue to act as director of product in the revenue department.

Messinger is the man spun off here, announced last week as chief technical officer of Twitter. It’s curious, though; sources said that in his new position, Messinger lost many — if not all — of the staff directly reporting to him, which would make it seem a less-than-desirable position to be in. I’m also told that Messinger had issues with recruiting enough engineers, a serious problem at an organization of Twitter’s size and scale. Recruiting, as any tech company will tell you, is of the utmost importance.

Of course, it could be that Messinger is better as a high-level thinker, as I’ve been told — someone who would do better focusing on the “big-picture” aspects of Twitter and what it will look like in the future, rather than down in the engineering trenches. Still, perhaps Messinger won’t be satisfied with the high-level CTO role in a few months, and depart for other pastures. (TBD on that one.)

To Be Continued

So that’s that. For now, most of the shifting is kaput (as far as I’m aware), and as it has been put to me, the Sippey/Fry combo is the “new world order in charge of the roadmap,” while Weil and Roetter will hold down the revenue product and engineering duties. (There were one or two other noteworthy shifts as well, including moving Raffi Krikorian up to VP of engineering in charge of Twitter’s platform.)

If all goes according to plan, you’ll hopefully see Twitter-the-product get better on a much faster-paced timetable.

Will it all work better than the previous layout? I don’t know, and I’m sure Twitter doesn’t either. We’ll have to check back in another year.

One of the best parts of planning the next D: All Things Digital conference — which is in its 11th iteration this year — is trying to figure out what group of top tech and media players will make the very best combination to bring real insight, news and forward thinking to our amazing audience, at the event and also online.

Some interviews one knows with certainty are going to be epic — such as our joint one with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Microsoft’s Bill Gates at D5 in 2007. Others, like our terrific session with Oracle’s Larry Ellison last year at D10, gave the attendees a new look at someone they thought they already knew well. Some are just plain funny — such as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason’s famous “death stare” in 2011 at D9.

What’s most clear throughout them all is that Walt Mossberg and I have been lucky in getting high-caliber and engaging speakers who are willing and able to sit in our signature red Steelcase chairs and answer our sometimes thorny questions.

This year’s D11 is no exception. While there are many more speakers we can’t announce quite yet, here’s the start of the list for the 2013 conference, which has been sold out since last fall:

As we did last year, we’ll be having Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker walk the audience through her famous annual Internet report, giving both her observations and prognostications about where the digital space has been and where it is headed next. Meeker’s slides come fast and furious, and often set some of the themes that will doubtless be raised by other speakers.

One speaker who has dominated many key memes this year has been Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whom we last had at D6 in 2008, when she appeared with CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Since then, a lot has happened at the social networking giant — including a tumultuous IPO and a need to quickly develop its mobile business — so there’s plenty to discuss related to Facebook. Of course, there is also a lot to talk about related to her recent book on women in the workplace, titled “Lean In,” which has garnered just a little bit of attention of late.

Another very voluble speaker will surely be Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We felt it was important to bring him back onstage, given all the change at the social communications company over the last year, from its aggressive efforts to build out its advertising business to its tangles with Facebook to its expected IPO in 2014. Twitter has emerged as a key company on the global stage — and it is Costolo’s job to keep it there.

One of the most explosive startups on the scene recently has, of course, been scrapbooking phenom Pinterest, whose steady CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann will appear at our conference for the first time. Unlike many attention-seeking entrepreneurs, Silbermann has quietly pushed the young company to the forefront of e-commerce and other key digital arenas by creating a unique and elegant way for people to share interests of all kinds. Despite its recent huge valuation, Pinterest has an unusual heft and influence in tech and beyond that few other such companies can claim.

Also of interest is the new leader of Motorola Mobility, the smartphone maker that is owned by Google but is being run separately by CEO Dennis Woodside. A longtime exec at the search giant, Woodside is charged with creating world-class hardware for the Android platform that can attract consumers and compete with a spate of rivals — while still maintaining a certain distance from the mothership.

Such an effort will require a lot of innovation, which is why Woodside is bringing along someone well known to D — Regina Dugan. The charismatic exec first appeared at D9 when she was director of the federal government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and she riveted the crowd with stories of Mach 10 airplanes and other cloak-and-dagger tech. Now she’s an SVP at Motorola Mobility, where she leads the Advanced Technology & Projects group.

How big companies are reacting to the Internet revolution has always been an important topic at our conference over the years, and there is no bigger conglomerate to ask about it than GE and its chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt. While the company operates across many segments, from energy to technology infrastructure to capital finance, the changes and impact of digital have been paramount for GE. In fact, Immelt recently wrote a provocative editorial on the “Industrial Internet” and the rise of intelligent machines about leveraging “the power of the cloud to connect machines embedded with sensors and sophisticated software to other machines (and to us) so we can extract data, make sense of it and find meaning where it did not exist before.” Heavier stuff than your basic jet engine (which GE makes, by the way).

Change has not been easy for Web-centric companies, either, including Cisco, whose CEO John Chambers has led the networking giant through the growth of the Internet since the very beginning. Still, Cisco has struggled with a number of recent consumer efforts, even as it has been aggressively shifting its focus to the cloud to continue to dominate in the network space and to push the idea of the “Internet of Everything,” where it plays a central role.

To ratchet up the conversation, we decided to pair Chambers with one of the enterprise’s most clever and fast-moving entrepreneurs, Aaron Levie of Box. The cloud services company just raised a mega round of funding and is headed for an IPO next year, but we also invited Levie because he is very, very funny and manages to explain the massive changes moving through the sector in a very, very funny way. We look forward to his take on how smaller upstarts like Box, Dropbox and many others are managing to best the big companies with innovation and chutzpah.

Speaking of that, there is no better tell-it-like-it-is exec in digital media than Barry Diller of IAC. We have had the razor-sharp Diller onstage at D before, but we thought it was time to bring him back because of his aggressive investment in Aereo, the Web TV service that mainstream TV networks abhor. Diller, who has run such a media operation before, is perhaps the perfect person to be disrupting them now, and to talk about the state of the media industry today. He’s also still owner of a lot of key Internet franchises that have had to react to the shift in consumer tastes and desires.

In another pairing, Jeff Zucker will join Diller onstage to debate how media is faring. It’s an important issue for him, since he was just hired by Time Warner to reinvigorate its CNN cable news brand in a fast-changing environment. Zucker has worked everywhere in the TV sector, but rethinking how it creates and delivers its offering in the future — while making more than digital dimes — is a massive task.

Also huge is the uphill battle new Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai faces in turning around the fortunes of the Japanese consumer electronics giant. As he overhauls the once-dominant company, he also must push forward on a number of fronts that include mobile, digital imaging, videogames and network services. There is also the upcoming debut of the PlayStation 4 console, which has yet to be unveiled, all of which has added pressure to Hirai’s quick-moving efforts at turnaround at Sony.

Hirai will be appearing with Jed York, CEO of the San Francisco 49ers, who is in the midst of building a digitally tricked-out new stadium for the storied football franchise, which is being described as a “large data center.” And more — including addressing the importance of technology in delivering the modern sports entertainment experience. The issue is one that every sports owner on the planet thinks about these days, as fans expect more and more ways to share, communicate and interact.

Using a sports metaphor, it’s a pretty good line-up so far, but the D11 speaker list is far from complete, with more very big names to be announced in the coming weeks. And, especially since we have no more tickets to sell, it’s important to remember that we will be using AllThingsD to bring you the news, videos and more that will allow everyone to experience it all, no matter where they are.

Twitter’s newest price hike went into effect earlier this year, and represents a 33 percent increase over the $150,000 rate the company was asking for in 2012. And it’s up 150 percent from the $80,000 a day it was getting for the ads back when it launched them in 2010.

The promoted trend lets an advertiser insert its own message atop the “trends” list on Twitter.com home pages and on Twitter apps; Twitter sells a single message a day, per territory. Except when it doesn’t: Today, for instance, there’s no promoted trend on the site.

Twitter started selling promoted trends after it launched its “Promoted Tweet” ads, which CEO Dick Costolo describes as the company’s “atomic unit” of its ad strategy.

But while advertisers are still trying to get their heads around paid Twitter messages — they’re not really banner ads, and they’re not really Google-like search ads —  promoted trends have been a hit from the get-go. That’s because it’s the closest thing the company has to a conventional display ad: If you buy one, you’ve got a very good chance that everyone who uses Twitter that day will see it.

So at the very least, the price hike should encourage Twitter and its investors, which are gearing up the company for an eventual IPO.

Any answer?

Preparing for an eventual IPO isn’t easy, taking years of planning, of careful strategy decisions, of picking your people perfectly. Even then, things can still go wrong. Just ask Facebook.

While an initial public offering is still far down the road for Twitter, perhaps sometime in 2014 at best, it seems the company wants its house in order now.

The culmination of this came on Wednesday evening as Twitter shuffled two of its highest-ranking execs, shifting Ali Rowghani from his position of CFO to COO, while moving recent hire and former Zynga treasurer Mike Gupta into the CFO seat.

Joi Ito/Flickr Newly dubbed Twitter COO Ali Rowghani

In typically understated Rowghani fashion, the move went down rather unceremoniously. Rowghani and Gupta updated their Twitter profiles with their new titles at some point on Wednesday. After word got out, CEO Dick Costolo congratulated the two men over Twitter.

Rowghani has long been a quiet, behind-the-scenes force in the organization, preferring to take a backseat to the limelight so often reserved for Costolo and co-founder and now Twitter board Chairman Jack Dorsey. Despite holding the CFO title for the better part of three years, Rowghani has worked in a major operational role inside the company, acting as Costolo’s most trusted adviser. Wednesday’s appointment just made it official.

But Twitter’s C-suite troika isn’t the only part of the organization that needed tweaking. Over the past year and a half, the company has quietly cherry-picked talent from around the Valley and re-organized its ranks — or “grew up,” if you will — better suiting itself to become a tech company to take seriously.

From the top down, Twitter looks much different than it did just a few years ago. Product, the core of Twitter, was split into three separate areas: Consumer, growth/international and revenue. Michael Sippey and Othman Laraki focused on consumer and growth/international, respectively, while splitting revenue responsibilities (after the departure in June of former product VP Satya Patel).

Engineering is almost entirely transformed. I’ve been told Twitter poached literally hundreds of Googlers to join the ranks of the engineering department, an area which was sorely deficient in 2010 considering the scale and growth of the product’s reach. Now Adam Messinger and Chris Fry have joined as engineering heads from Oracle and Salesforce, respectively. I’m told that both are recruiting heavily from their old organizations, too, bringing on much new engineering blood at a fast pace.

Design VP Mike Davidson

The design department is also in flux. New arrival Mike Davidson has been snatched away from his Seattle design gig to lead Twitter’s efforts as VP of Design, working with existing director Doug Bowman. Both are currently pushing hard to recruit new design talent, looking to fill nearly 10 slots in the department (while that sounds small, it’s nearly a quarter of the team’s current numbers).

Sales is no different. President of global revenue Adam Bain snatched up Richard Alfonsi from Google in June to be VP of global online sales, and tapped Xooglers Shilesh Rao and Stephen McIntyre, too.

The overall goal is this: At six years of age and now 200 million active users, Twitter is maturing beyond the scrappy start-up it was in its early days. On the one hand, that environment contributed to some of its most enjoyable early qualities for many employees. But I’m told by multiple people close to the company that part of the organization’s maturation means moving away from hiring the “generalist” types that populated early Twitter, moving instead to highly specialized industry veterans who have strong experience with very particular sets of skills.

In theory, that means reliability — of internal departments, of site infrastructure, of revenue, of a business model — of the type that makes a company stick around for the long haul. And ideally, it moves out from under the shadow of Twitter as the Valley company known so famously for its tales of internal strife (Costolo has often referred to the company’s bad rep as “palace intrigue,” not to be taken seriously).

If it’s an idyllic setting I’m painting here, part of Twitter’s process of closing ranks, it’s also not without its problems.

The company has swelled with new hires in a relatively short amount of time, ballooning up from a couple hundred employees to around 1,500 in under a year.

New talent is good, but explosive growth in such a short amount of time takes its toll on the company’s structure and DNA. Each new top recruit from Google has brought with him or her a host of new Googlers. So much the case, this is, that I’m told it’s not uncommon to hear new recruits explain “how we did things at Google” during team meetings or while working on collaborative projects.

DragonBe/Flickr

And with such an influx of new blood, I’m told many of the old guard are finding it difficult to recognize the Twitter they joined. Internal disagreements with Twitter’s new stance on its platform rules have been cause for some grumbling. The design team has seen a near exodus over the past two months (for many reasons, but not the least of which is Twitter’s changing internal vibe). The Google management style, incorporated — however unconsciously — by many of Twitter’s top talent, doesn’t always translate well when brought over to Twitter.

To put it another way that I’ve heard so often from current and former employees: Twitter is slowly growing more corporate in feel, day by day.

Is that a bad thing? Perhaps, if you’re a Valley type looking to live the start-up life. But if you’re a business on a trajectory with an IPO in a few years or less, perhaps Twitter is right where it needs to be.

Joi Ito/Flickr Newly dubbed Twitter COO Ali Rowghani

Rowghani, who has been with the company since 2010, came to Twitter to act as chief financial officer after leaving the same role he held at Walt Disney Company’s Pixar animation studios. He was at Pixar for more than nine years, serving as CFO for half that time.

Update 7 pm PT: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo just confirmed the news via tweet: “Congratulations to @rowghani on his new role as COO and to @mgupta on his new role as CFO.”

Rowghani has often been noted as the quiet, behind-the-scenes body man to Twitter CEO Costolo, taking on far more operational responsibilities than that of typical CFOs. Rowghani has had his hand in many important areas of the business, including contributing ideas around Twitter’s Promoted Suite of ad products, a key component of the company’s monetization efforts.

So effectively, Rowghani as COO is less of a new role than it is a solidification of his current efforts — a title change, as it were.

Newly dubbed Twitter CFO Mike Gupta

Twitter did not immediately respond for a request for comment.

The shuffle also comes on the heels of a major departure for Twitter, as VP of Growth Othman Laraki announced his departure from the company via tweet on Wednesday evening. Laraki was responsible for growing Twitter’s user base over the past year, which the company seems to have achieved; on Wednesday, Twitter announced it had reached the 200 million active user mark. He did not name his next landing point, though I assume he’ll be taking some time off, as he and his wife just had their first child.

The changes in the top ranks have been some time coming, as Twitter has spent the past year reorganizing the company into different teams, headed by high-profile tech hires stolen from other big companies around Silicon Valley (Google perhaps being the prime poaching target).

Earlier in the summer, Twitter snapped up Google sales guy Richard Alfonsi to become VP of global online sales, wrangling in most of the small and medium sized businesses that make of the long tail of Twitter’s ad business. Michael Sippey left SAY Media in January to head up Twitter’s VP of consumer product role, while Chris Fry and Adam Messinger were poached from Salesforce and Oracle, respectively, now holding VP of engineering posts.

Former VP of Growth Othman Laraki

Another potential pitfall is Twitter’s ability to hold on to key talent, as top figures like Laraki may prefer to leave the company after only a handful of years, opting instead to pursue the entrepreneurial route and build a new start-up. (Facebook, too, has this challenge to deal with.)

But it’s also another series of hires on Twitter’s long road in preparation for an IPO — which could potentially come in the next two years — solidifying key executive positions and building out the different divisions of the company under them.

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.

“RIP Fail Whale.”

Indeed, all throughout Nov. 6, that cutesy, once-ubiquitous cartoon — a symbol of a young Twitter’s infrastructure problems — was nary to be seen. The company saw record numbers of tweets flowing through the system, peaking at 327,452 tweets per minute as news orgs around the country called the race for President Obama. Despite the heavy load on the company’s servers, Twitter’s engineering team held fast.

And for a company trying to ensconce itself firmly into the online habits of billions of people, this was the best possible outcome.

You’d be forgiven if you aren’t familiar with the whale. A childlike image first created by illustrator Yiying Lu, the whale was adopted by Twitter as an error-page graphic. When the system was overloaded with too many tweets, users were greeted with the fail whale’s smiling face, a notification that the service was currently “over capacity.”

This was a mainstay of Twitter’s earlier days. Especially so during major world events, which inevitably spawned more tweets than Twitter’s infrastructure was accustomed to handling. Though the site maintained upward of 98 and 99 percent uptime on the whole, outages were glaring — and the digerati made sure to let it be known:

But, as the company has crawled out of its adolescence, the goal has been to eliminate all signs of the early instability. Twitter wants to become a mature, easy-to-use product. Akin, say, to a Facebook. Something your grandmother can use.

So, along with Jack Dorsey’s mantra of simplifying the product, keeping the service up, running and reliable has been priority number one for CEO Dick Costolo. Bare minimum, Twitter needs to always be on, no matter what. “It’s a metaphor for the entire company,” Costolo has said in previous press interviews.

It’s not just users that Costolo needs to woo. Amid a questionable financial climate for Internet companies, Twitter must prove to partners that its service can handle the strain of untold amounts of data flowing through its pipes daily, while still serving up the ad products that sponsors pay so dearly for. After all, Pepsi’s Promoted Tweet isn’t any good if the entire network is down for the count.

Though the service has proved more reliable in recent times, it has not been without its share of setbacks. Twitter went through a two-hour period of downtime this past summer, the longest continuous outage the microblogging site has experienced in more than a year. And little more than a month after this, Twitter again had serious site problems, going in and out of service for upward of a few hours.

But, as the polls closed and returns started pouring in on Tuesday evening, this wasn’t the case. It was Twitter’s watershed moment, performing as it should during the most tweeted-about political moments in the service’s six-year history.

Twitter’s struggles with infrastructure reminds me a bit of Herman Melville and his Captain Ahab. Indeed, a sea beast was the deranged captain’s ultimate undoing, never having sunk the final, fatal harpoon into Moby Dick’s pale and barnacled brow.

Perhaps, unlike Ahab, Twitter has finally put its great white whale to rest. We’ll see, come 2016.

Asa Mathat | AllThingsD.com

Earlier this month Twitter bought Vine, a three-man video-sharing start-up that has yet to launch. Twitter may build its own video hosting system, so it’s possible Vine may play a role in that effort one day.

But the main reason Twitter bought Vine is more concrete: Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to buy Vine.

Multiple sources say the Twitter co-founder was the one who decided that the company should buy the start-up, and pushed hard to make the purchase happen.

While CEO Dick Costolo ultimately signed off on the deal, “this happened because Jack wanted it to happen,” says a person familiar with the transaction.

And while this isn’t a mammoth transaction by 2012 standards, it’s still one of the biggest acquisitions Twitter has made. If the Vine guys stick around and hit their numbers, the company may end up paying north of $30 million for the start-up.

Lesson: Whatever else Jack Dorsey is up to at Twitter, he still has significant clout there.

Here’s the longer version of the Twitter/Vine story, as relayed to ATD by people who know both companies:

Vine, which is supposed to let users share brief video clips from their iPhones, formed in June and was supposed to launch this fall. SV Angel’s David Lee, who had backed Vine, showed Dorsey the app in the hope that the design guru would give it his seal of approval.

Instead, Dorsey ended up pushing to buy the company — not as a standard “acqhire,” but with the notion that the Vine guys would keep working on the app and release it on their own.

The arrangement is supposed to echo the one that Facebook and Instagram reached earlier this year, and that’s not a coincidence. At one point, Dorsey had pushed Twitter to buy that photo-sharing app, as well.

Vine and its investors turned down Twitter’s first offer. They accepted a second, much larger one.

Vine’s backers got Twitter stock, and Vine’s three-man team got a mix of cash, stock and incentives. The Vine guys are now Twitter employees, but they won’t go to work there. Instead, they’ll stay in their New York headquarters and keep working on their app.

Can’t wait to see it.

In its continued search to strengthen the company’s board of directors, Twitter has placed top priority on adding a woman to the current all-male roster, according to sources close to the situation.

A number of female candidates have already been interviewed, but none have been selected, these sources say.

It’s an obvious logical step for the microblogging service.

As Kara Swisher noted nearly two years ago, Web 2.0 companies have few women board members, unlike a number of public tech companies.

That includes Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, LinkedIn and eBay — major technology companies whose boards include one or more women.

But Twitter does not.

It has not been alone. Facebook added its first female director only recently, with COO Sheryl Sandberg being appointed to the board over the summer. That was soon followed by Zynga, which named longtime digital exec Ellen Siminoff recently.

Twitter’s search for a female director does not sideline the company’s continued search for other seasoned media players to join its board.

As previously reported, sources say that Hollywood exec Peter Chernin has been on Twitter’s short list for a seat. Along with years of experience at News Corp., Chernin played a role in the formation of the Hulu streaming video service, and currently sits on the board of Internet radio Web site Pandora.

Currently, Twitter’s board includes CEO Dick Costolo, company founders Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, and investors such as Peter Fenton of Benchmark Capital and Peter Currie of Currie Capital. Former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt also holds a seat.

After conflicts of interest arose, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue stepped down from his board position over the summer. McCue’s seat is presumably the one being filled, but the size of the board might also expand by two or more.

Considering the company’s recent push into the mainstream film and television arena, along with seeking more advertising revenue, the lack of at least one major media exec on the board could be seen as a deficiency.

Twitter declined to comment on this report.

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.

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.

Here’s one of the ways they could get there: A new slug of ad dollars, generated by an overhaul of its ad platform.

We’ll go into details below, but here’s the summary:

*Twitter is effectively providing advertisers access to all of its 140 million users, via targeted “Promoted Tweet” ads. Prior to this, the only way you could shove a marketing message into someone’s stream was if they already followed your company, or if they followed someone who looked a lot like your company. Now those restrictions are gone.

*Twitter is also making it cheaper, at least potentially, to reach those 140 million users. Twitter sells its ads via an auction model, and used to require advertisers to bid at 50 cents per “engagement.” Now they’ve dropped the minimum to a penny.

Big picture: If advertisers like Twitter’s platform — and we don’t really know yet, because it’s so new — they now have many more ways to use it. Best-case scenario for Twitter is that this gets them closer to creating that elusive equivalent to Google’s AdWords, the most effective ad machine in history.

On to the details:

Lower prices: Straightforward, no? But for the record, Twitter product guy Kevin Weil wants us to know that this doesn’t mean Twitter will be flooded with bargain-basement ads for teeth whiteners. Twitter’s “promoted” product suite is only supposed to show ads that users are responding to, so simply winning an auction isn’t enough to get into the stream. Twitter’s preferred way to describe the move is that the lower prices will “drive greater ROI.” But an equally valid way to describe the move would be: A bunch of people who couldn’t afford Twitter ads now can.

“Enhanced interest targeting”: This is what’s going to allow advertisers to hawk their stuff more broadly on Twitter, and it’s what Twitter was referring to earlier this summer, when we got our hands on their ad pitch deck. The gist: Now advertisers can try targeting some 350 “interest categories,” as well as users who share “similar interests” with a specific Twitter account.

That allows more precision for pitches, but it also opens up a lot more territory.

Here’s how it would work: In the past, Starbucks could only send its “Promoted Tweets” to the 2.8 million people who were already following its own Twitter account, or to users that Twitter determined were “similar,” based on its own black-box algorithm.

But now Starbucks could pitch, say, technology fans, to tell them about its new Square tie-up. Or it could target people who resemble the people who follow Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey.

Twitter guesses which “interests” you have, or if you’re similar to the users who follow a given account, based primarily on the stuff you’re already following, and the stuff you retweet. Weil won’t go into detail about how it arrives at those conclusions, but notes that it’s already using similar logic when it makes “who to follow” suggestions on your home page, or when it tells you about particular stories on your “discover” page.

One important note: Twitter still isn’t responding to anything you actually type on Twitter yourself. That is, if you ask your Twitter pals for recommendations for a new backpack, Twitter can’t figure that out and serve up Tweets from backpack makers.

That makes it less effective than Google’s ad machine, which has users’ “intent” nailed. But, then again, no one has a machine like Google. And given that most Twitter users rarely or never Tweet at all, Twitter’s never going to work that way, anyway.

But figuring out what kind of stuff you like, based on the people and things you pay attention to, is one of the core tenets of social media marketing. Which no one has really cracked yet. If Twitter can do it, it’s a big deal.

If Twitter ads really take off, it will be because CEO Dick Costolo will have figured out how to sell lots of little ads to small marketers, in the same way Google did more than a decade ago. In the meantime, the company seems to be succeeding with the other end of the spectrum: Big marketers interested in experimenting with a brand-new format.

Last year, Twitter ad boss Adam Bain made a point of targeting big brands like Pepsi and American Express. And this year he’s seeing some of that work pay off, as some of them are committing to campaigns that will run for much of 2012.

Twitter won’t talk publicly about its ad-selling efforts. But you can get a glimpse of what they’re doing via a pitch deck the company recently used to woo a big publicly traded company. We’re not going to show you all of it here, primarily because some of the slides identified the would-be advertiser*. But you can still get a pretty good sense of it.

A few notes in advance:

• Twitter is still doing lots of basic explaining about what it is and how it works: Yes, people still use Twitter to talk about their breakfast. But it’s important for Bain et al to explain that people use Twitter to pass along lots of other stuff, too: Rallying cries (like the #Jan25 hashtag during Egypt’s revolution of 2011), cool images (like Stefanie Gordon’s groggy space shuttle pix) or celebrity smackdowns (Drake v. T. Boone Pickens). Big idea: Your brand could be one of those things people share on Twitter, too!
• Also important for Twitter to keep repeating: Unlike Facebook, we’re totally cool with mobile.
• Those “Event pages” Twitter rolled out last month are going to be important for big advertisers. Obviously they are — that’s why Twitter spent money buying TV ads to promote them. But that slide highlighting them reinforces just how attractive they will be for brands – and what a nice compliment they’ll be to 140-character bleats  — when Twitter gets around to selling them.
• Spend enough and Twitter will offer you all kinds of goodies. Just like any other big ad company, Twitter offers white glove treatment for its most important customers, and it hints at some of this in the “Joint Business Plans” slide: Early looks at new ad products, help coming up with new campaigns, custom events, etc. The part where Twitter promises to provide all kinds of “analytics” might be particularly relevant for some of the third party companies that do the same stuff.
• Spend enough and Twitter will let you spend less.  That same slide mentions “key discounts,” detailed on an “investment grid.” I’m not reprinting that one, but am happy to tell you what’s in there: Twitter says it will knock 10 percent off the rate card for anyone who ponies up more than $6 million a year (An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that number as $6,000). Again, standard issue for any big ad business. But always interesting to see spelled out.

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No, not at his job (at least, not that I know of). He’s kicking butt and taking names in a poker tournament with big money at stake: As of 10 pm PT, Chan is ranked in the top five players out of the 3,000-plus people who entered the game.

How do I know all of this? He’s live-tweeting the whole thing.

I’m not watching him alone. Many of his colleagues at Twitter — Director of Platform Ryan Sarver, monetization chief Adam Bain, sports and entertainment head Omid Ashtari — are cheering Chan along in the appropriate manner: Via Twitter, of course.

The annual World Series of Poker event, now in its 43rd go-round, is considered one of the premier competitive poker tournaments in the U.S., where both pro and amateur players compete for a pot worth nearly $3 million. The buy-in is a steep $1,000, but it only takes fighting to make it into the top 324 players to come out ahead: The lowest amount of money a player can take home once they reach the money is nearly two grand, while first place takes home a cool half-million dollars.

Chan is in the Top 5 on the leaderboard as of this writing, with a little more than 50 players remaining. That guarantees that even if he comes in last place, Chan will walk away with at least eight grand. Right now, if he took fourth (where he’s currently ranked), Chan would take home more than $150,000.

Chan isn’t the first Valley-ite to take the hot seat at the WSOP, though he has probably done the best: Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya took 101st place last year.

It’s already late, and despite the blinds rising fast, I don’t see this game ending before midnight. But, as Chan notes in a tweet, he probably won’t be able to call in sick tomorrow, given that much of Twitter — including his boss, CEO Dick Costolo — is watching him compete via his tweets.

I’m rooting for the guy myself — let’s just hope he doesn’t tip his hand to his competitors via Twitter.

Teensy update, 10:25 pm PT:: Platform chief Ryan Sarver lets me know that Chan’s hot streak isn’t limited to his poker cards — Chan was also in part responsible for Twitter’s cards, as well. Touche, Ryan. Touche.

That’s the point of the TV ads Twitter bought yesterday — to showcase what marketers can do when they get their hands on an actual Twitter Web page. And that’s what Twitter hopes to point out in high-profile ad campaigns to come.

Twitter’s Nascar campaign shows what Twitter can do with a single keyword term — and, presumably, what an advertiser can do once they purchase that keyword for a day (or more?). But Twitter has been steadily amping up what advertisers can do on Twitter.com for a couple years.

First it overhauled the site to make it easier to embed graphics and videos. The idea was to play up the notion that you didn’t have to write a thing to enjoy Twitter — you could just visit Twitter.com’s “consumption environment” and look at the the cool stuff other people, and/or advertisers, put up.

Then, late last year, it started offering brands their own pages, which made the message even clearer for advertisers: You can use our site to do more than put up Tweets — you can stick videos on there, or even stuff that looks a whole lot like the big banner ads that everyone says are dead but everyone keeps spending a lot of money on anyway.

You’ll see some combination of this stuff used throughout the summer, in the big Pepsi promotion that Twitter announced last month. It’s also likely to come into play with the ad campaigns Twitter is trying to sell in conjunction with ESPN.

All of this is important to Twitter because, while it hopes that the self-serve ads it launched earlier this year become the equivalent of Google’s AdWords engine, it also wants cool stuff it can sell to the Pepsis of the world. Those guys want a whole lot more than tweets — they want big honking Web ads, like the kind they can still get at Yahoo or AOL — but not at Facebook.

Look for more tweaks to come. For instance, Twitter has some kind of product launch set for this month that’s supposed to make it even easier to get video into the Twitter.com timeline. And while people who’ve heard about it tell me it’s not an ad product right now, it’s easy to imagine how something like that could be pitched to ad guys.

Meanwhile, none of these flashy ads have anything to do with Twitter on mobile phones — which, as Twitter was happy to point out last week — is the way an increasing number of its users get to the service. But Twitter-savvy folks tell me that is supposed to change sooner than later.

That will be a tough challenge to pull off, because I can’t imagine that Dick or Jack will let anyone monkey with the core Twitterstream, for fear of freaking people out. But maybe there’s another way to get there.

Twitter only started selling mobile ads in February. But in recent weeks, the company has started seeing more money from the Promoted Tweets it sells on phones than from the same product it sells on desktop computers, says CEO Dick Costolo.

Here’s Costolo, speaking at an Economist conference in San Francisco today:

Even though we launched our ad platform on the web, and only started running ads on mobile a few months ago, it has already been the case a couple weeks ago that we saw mobile ad revenue for the first time in a day be greater than non-mobile revenue. So mobile revenue for us is already doing delightfully well; I couldn’t be happier with it.

That’s a marked contrast from Facebook, which also began selling mobile ads in February, and told investors in advance of its IPO that it didn’t have any meaningful mobile revenue.

Then again, Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and Twitter may have done a couple hundred million. So a boom for Costolo is a blip for Mark Zuckerberg.

Still, Costolo seemed to go out of his way today to point out that mobile advertising isn’t a riddle for Twitter to solve, because Twitter has always been a mobile product.

He told the Economist’s crowd that 60 percent of Twitter’s 140 million users get to the service via a mobile device, up from 55 percent six months ago. And he said that those mobile users are more engaged and use the service more frequently than the ones who get on via a PC.

Translation: If Twitter does get to $1 billion in revenue in a couple years, it’s going to do so because of the phone, not despite it.

Members sign up to receive code they can choose to include on their sites to alert visitors about a perceived threat to Internet freedom from legislation or elsewhere.

The Internet Defense League already has onboard sites that can motivate the online masses: WordPress, Imgur, Reddit, Cheezburger Network, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark have signed up.

A more formal launch is planned in two weeks when Congress returns to session, according to Tiffiniy Cheng of Fight for the Future, which put the League together along with Reddit co-founder and de facto spokesperson for the Internet Alexis Ohanian.

The League alerts are meant to be like an emergency broadcast system — or a “bat signal” for the Internet — cuing activist sites to swoop in and save someone in distress like Batman would.

Cheng and Ohanian joked that their version could be called a “cat signal,” referencing Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism,” which posits that user-generated content platforms excel at getting activist messages out to larger audiences who are there to share pictures and videos and stories about cats. That’s in part because when governments shut down these sites to block activist activity, the cute-cat-sharing masses get pissed.

Cheng’s Fight for the Future is the activist non-profit that organized an online day-long protest in response to SOPA and PIPA by distributing a tool that large and small publishers could use to black out their own sites by choice, and then to overlay information about how would-be visitors could contact their representatives in Congress.

Another collaboration between Fight for the Future and Ohanian had two crowd-funded “Don’t Mess with the Internet” billboards placed near the offices of SOPA author and Texas representative Lamar Smith last week.

Many of the sites that joined the Internet Defense League so far also participated in the SOPA/PIPA blackout, along with heavyweights like Wikipedia and Tumblr (which are not yet members).

The proposed “cat signal” actions could be something less drastic than a blackout, like a prominently displayed alert message. As the League site describes it, “The next time there’s an emergency, we’ll tell you and send new code. Then it’s your decision to pull the trigger.”

Blackout activism over SOPA and PIPA was effective but also somewhat controversial. At the time, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo called it “silly.”

“Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish,” he tweeted.

Costolo later followed up to say that there were 3.9 million tweets about SOPA and PIPA on the day of the blackout, and he justified his criticism by saying, “When you’ve got an amplifier like that, you don’t pull the batteries out of the microphone.”

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

Pires, who is currently senior director of communications and brand at PayPal, worked with new Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson for many years when he ran the popular payments service. Sources at Yahoo said she would begin April 16, taking up the position of SVP of global communications that has been held by Eric Brown. He’ll apparently be leaving the company.

The well-regarded Pires comes to Yahoo at a particularly dicey time, having just announced the firing of 2,000 employees today with more to come, along with an expected restructuring next week. The Silicon Valley Internet giant is also facing a noisy proxy fight with activist shareholder Third Point and is contemplating the sale of big parts of its business. (And then there’s me, so I’ll pay for lunch, Amanda!)

Stricker, who is director of global communications and public affairs at the search giant, will be VP of communications at Twitter. I wrote him about the new job this morning without a response until tonight, after he tweeted the new job. The affable Stricker will start in a few weeks at the social communications service, where his big challenges will be explaining how Twitter is making bank and when the heck it is going public.

I’m thrilled to be joining Twitter — and thankful for my time at Google. Both are more than just companies. They’re movements.

— Gabriel Stricker (@gabrielstricker) April 5, 2012

(Tip o’ the day, Gabe: Don’t tell CEO Dick Costolo that bloggers are funnier than he is. ’Cuz we are.)

I’m sorry for what I said on Twitter last night. No excuses.

– Former OMGPOP CEO Dan Porter, apologizing after describing Shay Pierce, a former OMGPOP employee who declined to work for Zynga, as “the weakest one on the whole team.” Among Porter’s many critics was Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: “Wow, what a nitwit comment that was.”

Simple, right? And if it works the way the narrator dude pitches it, then this is an important launch for Dick Costolo and company: They’ll get an engine that brings in small dollars from a really big group of advertisers — just like Google’s AdWords. Meanwhile, Twitter ad guy Adam Bain can work on courting a small group of advertisers with really big dollars to spend on other campaigns — just like traditional media companies.

(Department of Nice Touches notation: While Twitter is deeply integrated into Apple’s mobile platform, the ad doesn’t call out the iPhone by name. But the audio cue when they mention mobile makes it clear what they’re thinking about.)