Speaking at the D: Dive Into Media conference, the Twitter CEO said the changes to the board had more to do with shrinking the number of directors than it did with “some ninja move” on his part.

“The reality is much more boring than that,” Costolo said, responding to a PandoDaily article on the subject.

Asked about whether Twitter will follow Facebook in going public, Costolo said that his focus remains on building a business that is going to be around 10 years from now.

Although Costolo said the company has to be aware of regulations that might force it to go public, such as when it has a certain number of shareholders, he is not worried about whether there might only be a narrow window to go public.

“I don’t pay any attention to that,” he said.

The company has continued to remain private, he said, and declined to say when it might go public.

“I choose not to answer that question,” he said.

The news cycle, already pretty fast, has sped up another notch.

“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter election,” Costolo said, during his talk at D: Dive Into Media.

In last week’s State of the Union speech, for example, “When Obama made that spilled-milk joke, there was this collective groan that went up,” Costolo said.

More importantly, Republicans took to the service to live-tweet their rebuttals, rather than waiting for the speech to end.

“Tomorrow morning it will be too late to react to what was said the day before,” Costolo said. “Washington is really starting to realize that.”

Politicians, he said, have taken note. Nearly all the Republican candidates have used promoted tweets to amplify their message.

The company said last week in a blog post that it is now able to censor tweets by country, igniting something of a firestorm over how it will use that power.

“There’s been no change in our stance or attitude or policy with respect to content on Twitter,” Costolo said, speaking Monday evening at the D: Dive into Media Conference.

What is different, Costolo said, is that now it will only have to block tweets in the country issuing an order, rather than for all users around the world.

“When we receive one of those, we want to leave the content up for as many people as possible while adhering to the local law,” Costolo said.

He added that the policy isn’t really about China or Iran, countries where Twitter is already blocked entirely. Nor does he expect this new capability to allow the company entree into China.

“I don’t think the current environment in China is one in which we could operate,” Costolo said.

Costolo also rejected the idea that Twitter could just ignore certain countries’ laws and still do business there.

“It is simply not the case you can operate in these countries and choose which of the laws we want (to adhere to),” Costolo said.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is warming up the hot seat tonight at our D:Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif. A liveblog of his interview with Peter Kafka will be here, starting at 6 pm PT.

While you’re waiting, watch:

6:12 pm: We’re just about to get started.

6:15 pm: Here’s a photo from inside the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom, where D: Dive Into Media is about to get under way.

6:18 pm: Here’s a photo of Dick Costolo and Kara Swisher backstage in the Green Room.

Okay, now that our live attendees have gotten a drink and a bite in them, we’re ready to start for real. Sorry for the delay! Feel free to drink along at home.

“Don’t worry if you have to go to the bathroom,” says Kara. “Rupert is in the back, tweeting the entire event.”

She’s kidding, but we’ll be here liveblogging and posting news stories until our fingers go numb.

Right now, we’re showing a video expose, made with Funny or Die, on the excesses of D conferences. Big takeaway: Jason Kilar is a fantastic actor. Will post this online as soon as I get the code.

Also, Martha Stewart is a great sport.

And now, the man we made you wait for (sorry!): Dick Costolo. (Consider the comments paraphrased unless they’re in quotes.)

Peter Kafka: You had a partnership with Google, and now you’re having a public fight [over inclusion of social data in search results]. What happened?

Costolo: There are about 900 people working at Twitter now, and it’s just a matter of fact that Google happens to be the company from which more Twitter employees are drawn than any other. About 80 or 90 came from Google, including myself. And we look to Google as the shining light on the hill.

We think that when people are searching for things like @itunes or if they see a hashtag on a billboard, people are going to go to Google to look for them, and we think they should go where they want to.

Regarding access to data, Google crawls us over 100 million times per day; the Googlebot has more than three billion pages. They have the data, I think, that they need.

We just weren’t able to come to an agreement on the details.

Kafka: Are you guys going to end up in the same war with Google as Facebook?

Costolo: No, it’s not a zero-sum game. He compares it to dealing with people in the Twitter ecosystem. We’re growing faster than we’ve ever grown before, irrespective of anything Facebook or Google is doing. All these companies can coexist.

Kafka: What’s the deal with this selective tweeting policy?

Costolo: There’s been no change in our policy. What we were announcing was a capability we now have to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible while adhering to the local law.

“This is purely a reactive capability. We don’t proactively do anything.”

Costolo says Twitter is already blocked in Iran and China, and he doesn’t see a way under the current system that Twitter would ever operate in China.

The point is: This capability isn’t a prelude to trying to go into China.

Kafka asks for some more hypotheticals, and Costolo gets more emphatic, calling Twitter’s policy “the most honest, transparent and forward-looking way.”

“When we get a legal order that is valid, we will try to make sure that all the tweets are viewable in as many parts of the world as possible.”

6:42 pm: Kafka moves on to SOPA and PIPA. Costolo proposes a summit in San Luis Obispo for Northern and Southern California to meet. He says, less in jest: “It’s certainly the case that piracy is an issue for content creators. However, the SOPA and PIPA legislation we view as flawed legislation that wasn’t written with the perspective of both sides of the debate.”

Costolo adds that Twitter has more than 45 people working in its trust and safety department, and it abides by copyright laws.

Kafka: What could you have done instead of blacking out your site to protest SOPA?

Costolo: There were 3.9 million tweets that day, Wednesday, about SOPA and PIPA. When you’ve got an amplifier like that, you don’t pull the batteries out of the microphone.

Kafka: You’re a media company — are you comfortable with that assessment?

Costolo: We’re not a media company. We’re in the media business. We distribute traffic. We’re one of the largest drivers of traffic to all sorts of other media property.

For more on Costolo’s comments about Twitter and censorship, check out this post.

By the way, this might be hard to convey via liveblog, but Costolo is continually giving Kafka a really hard time about everything — his voice, the chair, the microphone. He is determined not to do a straight Q&A.

Costolo is now talking about whether Twitter would do other forms of business besides ads. He says analytics and commerce are options.

As for the advertising business itself, “It’s growing incredibly well.” Ad units are: Promoted tweets in timelines, promoted accounts and promoted trends. “They perform up and down the stack for brand advertisers; display advertisers, they work well,” Costolo says. Now it’s all about scaling.

Ads first came out in April 2010, Costolo notes. An ad with Barclays a couple of weeks ago, he says, had over 50 percent engagement and continues to. Ads are rolled out to 100 percent of users of Twitter.com.

Kafka: There doesn’t seem to have been any outcry about that.

Costolo: No, our ad quality is good. Plus, people learned about how to market and promote on Twitter before we had advertising, so they already “understand its real-time nature.” We think we can create a lasting company if we just scale this business.

Kafka asks about profits; Costolo says “no comment” a bunch of times.

Kafka: Let’s talk politics.

Costolo: “I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter election.”

The fascinating thing about 2012 — we really saw this during the State of the Union address. When Obama made the spilled-milk joke, there was this collective groan, and we didn’t have to wait for the pundits to tell us that. Republicans live-tweeted. “Tomorrow morning it will be too late to react to what was said the day before.”

Twitter gives people a human element, from Chad Ochocinco tweeting about the Premiere League, to politicians.

Kafka turns to talking about how Twitter works with TV.

“Twitter is the focal point for this shared experience,” Costolo says.

Costolo: Twitter is extending the runway of the conversation. If you look at the trajectory of conversations about “Glee,” it starts before the East Coast airing, then goes to 1,000 percent, then extends across the country.

Now they’re talking about Howard Stern live-tweeting “Private Parts.” Kafka says he tuned in after seeing the tweets, but isn’t sure he would tune in if Stern did it again. Costolo says it’s just the first inning. There are lots of possibilities for how to use Twitter, with new ones coming from Simon Cowell, Republican debates, etc.

Kafka asks about Twitter taking revenue from TV, and Costolo reverts to his everybody-can-happily-coexist thesis. “It’s more about value creation, not value extraction,” he says.

Kafka asks what Costolo thinks of check-in services (I think he means things like GetGlue for checking into TV shows). Costolo says he doesn’t think an overt check-in is necessary; these conversations will just happen naturally.

Kafka: What are you doing on discovery?

Costolo: We just introduced this “Discover” tab. We have so much content now, we need to surface it to people, especially new users.

Costolo says “Discover” should be more personalized based on the accounts you follow, etc. Sounds like something Twitter is working on.

Some challenges for Twitter include finding tweets that end up being world-changing, even though that’s not clear when they first are tweeted. Like the guy in Abottabad who tweeted about a helicopter overhead when the Osama Bin Laden raid was happening.

For more on Costolo’s comments on how Twitter is changing politics, check out this post.

Costolo is now addressing people who use Twitter for consumption only. “That’s great, and we need to encourage more of that,” he says, noting that 99 percent of the people who watch TV don’t also create it. He wants to make Twitter “like checking your watch,” where people glance and then go away.

Integration with Apple has increased engagement, usage, etc., on iOS devices, Costolo says. “They’re kind of a mentor company for us,” Costolo says of Apple, noting Twitter’s inventor, Jack Dorsey, is focused on simplification and clarity, just like Apple.

Kafka: How did Facebook not get that deal?

Costolo: You’d have to ask them. Our conversation with Apple was quick and efficient. We thought it was a fantastic idea.

Kafka: Who’s really in charge, you or Jack?

Costolo: Jack’s focus is on three specific things: Product vision, brand and identity, and representing the company externally. “The fascinating thing about Jack is he’s got all these people out there in the world telling him you’re the next great thing, you’re the next Steve Jobs, and it’s pretty amazing for him to be as open-minded and humble about the product as he is. He is just as likely to come in in the morning and say, ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that, let’s do it your way.’”

Costolo says Evan Williams and Biz Stone are the same way, very humble.

Costolo and Dorsey meet twice a week, once at the beginning, once at the end.

First audience question comes from none other than Kara Swisher. She asks about Facebook’s IPO.

Costolo replies: Mark and Sheryl are doing a great job running that company. It’s a really big company and they’ve had amazing success. I tell our company we need to focus on our own goals. We don’t care about the market window for going public, or whether there is a window. It will be fascinating to see what happens. I’m sure everyone will stay up Wednesday night reading the S-1, but I have to run my own company.

Twitter will probably go public, says Costolo, because the cap table can’t include more than 500 shareholders.

Next audience question comes from a woman who says she’s from Qualcomm, asking about mobile.

Costolo says he thinks Twitter lacks a compelling feature-phone experience, and that’s something it’s working on.

Next question from a Rogers Ventures VC. He asks about analytics.

Costolo says Twitter is trying to be clear that it will provide the core-user experience of Twitter.

Costolo: I’d rather provide a baseline of data, and then other companies can add UI and other things. I think companies try to ascribe too much value to data. It’s not that easy to be in the data business. It’s hard to scale across verticals. So we’re happy for other people to do that.

Now Costolo is asked about PandoDaily’s report about board changes and his “cojones.”

“It’s nice to ascribe to this stuff that I did some crazy ninja move. The reality is much more boring than that.”

Now a question about the rationale for Twitter acquisitions. Costolo talks about adding TweetDeck for prosumer users, and Summify for summarizing what you’ve missed in the past few days. He says he walked into the New York Times newsroom and saw TweetDeck on every monitor, and “thought it was important that we own it.”

Question about enhanced brand profiles (these last few questions have been from other reporters in the audience, but I didn’t catch all their names). Costolo says the idea is to allow brands to use Twitter as a customer relationship management tool, but not have those reply tweets highlighted at the top of their streams.

Last question is about “mobile-first” design, and second-screen mobile users versus people who are truly mobile.

Costolo says Twitter starts with iPhone and Android designs when it works on new products, then moves to everything else. This is a change, he says — Twitter used to go the other direction. It doesn’t design specifically for the “second-screen” experience.

And that’s it! Time to go back to watching television, tweeting and working on your ninja moves.

“At Twitter, The Future is You!” is described as an internal Hackweek project to “make the best/worst recruiting video of all time.” It does indeed manage to be both laugh-worthy and cringe-worthy. (Bonus: Watch Twitter CEO Dick Costolo try to keep a straight face.)

By the way, this isn’t Twitter’s first witty recruiting video, though one from two years ago was more “Rushmore” where this is more “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”

@digiphile @jayrosen_nyu that’s just silly. Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish.

– Dick Costolo, via Twitter, in response to a tweet by Alex Howard wondering whether Twitter would participate in Wikipedia’s Jan. 18 SOPA blackout

Solution: Be your own paparazzi!

Costolo posted this awesome surfing action shot on his Twitter account in the wee hours of this morning.

He attributed the pic to Federated Media founder John Battelle, who’s also vacationing in Hawaii this week.

By the way, Costolo doesn’t limit himself to unplanned dives, as this appears to precede. He’ll be speaking at our D:Dive Into Media conference next month.

If you’re reading this site, you know who all of these folks are. But just for formality’s sake:

Jason Kilar is CEO of Hulu, the video joint venture co-owned by Comcast, Disney and News Corp.’s broadcast TV units. The site has been a huge hit with viewers and subscribers, who have put it on pace to generate $500 million in revenue this year. But its owners aren’t quite sure what to do with it: They put it up for sale this summer, then decided to hang on to it after all. This will be Kilar’s first major public appearance since that tumult, so we’ll have plenty of questions.

Dick Costolo is CEO of Twitter, which has moved from Web oddity to a service used by more than 100 million people a month. Twitter’s founders didn’t like the notion of turning their baby into a media company, but that’s exactly what Costolo is trying to do now; he is ramping up efforts to attract more eyeballs and sell more ads. And he’s leaning heavily on big media companies — especially TV networks and movie distributors — to make that happen.

Martha Stewart is the founder of Martha Stewart Living, the multimedia empire she built from scratch, which now includes magazines, TV shows, a Web site and multiple lines of branded goods; her newest coup is a big-dollar deal with J.C. Penney. She’ll be joined onstage by Lisa Gersh, the president and chief operating officer Stewart brought in from NBC Universal nearly a year ago. At NBC U, Gersh had overseen the acquisition of the Weather Channel, among other duties; she had previously been chief operating officer at Oxygen Media.

They’ll join a lineup that includes ESPN President John Skipper, YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Warner Music Chairman Edgar Bronfman Jr., News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey, Clear Channel CEO Bob Pittman, Legendary Pictures head Thomas Tull and Vevo CEO Rio Caraeff. And we may still have a surprise or two between now and the end of January.

All Things Digital’s first-ever media conference runs Jan. 30 and 31 at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Niguel, an hour south of Los Angeles. See you there.

So Twitter.com’s new overhaul may indeed make it easier and faster for users, as Liz Gannes reported this afternoon. But it’s also much more inviting to advertisers — the logical next step as the company tries to make Twitter more of a “consumption environment.”

There are two different things going on here: Twitter is making its basic site more attractive and engaging by making it easier to view things like embedded videos. And it has created “brand pages” for advertisers, where they can have a lot more control over what users see.

Both of these are very simple ideas, but they’re essential if the company is going to convince marketers that Twitter is more than a novelty.

A sticky site has an obvious upside for advertisers, because it gives them a better chance to get their messages — sold, right now, via “Promoted Tweets” — in front of more eyeballs. And the brand pages solve a basic problem that Twitter advertisers have had so far: They haven’t had a home page to deliver messages that might take longer than 140 characters.

Twitter isn’t charging for the brand pages, and it says they will open them up to everyone eventually. But it’s not a coincidence that it’s launching with big-budgeted marketers like American Express, Pepsi, Disney and Dell.

This is the kind of value-add product that sales boss Adam Bain and his team want to offer to big spenders, at the same time they’re rolling out a Google-like self-serve platform for small buyers.

You can see quite clearly how this will work for the big guys, once they figure out the best way to use it. Click on over to the new brand page for “Ghost Protocol,” the newest Mission: Impossible movie from Paramount, to see a good example. And if you can’t see, or just want to watch a video, I can help you out, too — here’s the key element of the new page:

[Shutterstock: Andrey Eremin]

The new layout puts additional content and context inline within tweets, rather than off to the side. It’s also supposed to be 500 percent faster than Twitter was three or four months ago. And it looks different and sleeker; for instance, the navigation bar is now on the left instead of the right.

Nope, this is not a new product or feature — which by now seems to be Twitter’s least favorite thing! — but rather a conceptual and visual redesign.

Twitter contains four key functions, said the company’s co-leaders Jack Dorsey and Dick Costolo, addressing a gaggle of media from Twitter’s new industrial chic, uninsulated and barely renovated new headquarters in San Francisco.

The functions are tabs across the top bar in the new design: “home” — that’s the timeline of tweets, which you can click to expand; “connect,” signified by the @ sign, as in a user name; “discover,” a.k.a. emerging and relevant topics and activities, signified by a hash sign; and “me,” which are profile pages.

“Discover” is actually something new — it’s a tab dedicated to links and media that Twitter has determined are globally interesting as well as personally relevant to a user’s interests. It’s a lightweight algorithmically curated news aggregator, with snippets of text from linked stories and content embedded inline.

Also, select brands — 21 at launch — have access to “enhanced” profile pages, which have wide banners at the top and the ability to feature a single tweet above the regular timeline. Here’s one for Pepsi.

Dorsey said the design is meant to make Twitter more approachable and accessible. Early active users created the @ and # conventions, which have become key to the way Twitter works, but many users have no idea what they mean.

“Twitter should be usable for people who know the shortcuts and also equally usable for those who don’t,” Dorsey said.

Users can “unlock” the new experience by downloading the newest versions of Twitter’s mobile apps for iPhone and Android, or they can get it through Twitter’s Web site over the next couple months, Costolo said.

Here’s an info page about the launch, which Twitter is calling “Fly.”

Here’s what my new Twitter.com homepage looks like:

And here’s a before (today) and an after (architectural rendering) of what the new Twitter office cafeteria looks like.

Does that mean new products? Probably — but with this company, you never know.

Let’s face it, Twitter has what’s probably an unprecedented world-changing to product-innovating ratio. It’s still a small set of simple tools to send short messages out to a network.

But hey, there’s a reason people joke about the perils of reinventing the wheel.

In fact, at least part of seeing what Twitter is building is likely to be a tour of ongoing renovation of an actual physical building, not a revamped site or app or relevancy filtering features. The event is being held at Twitter’s planned new headquarters at San Francisco’s historic Market Square building. This is the one in the middle of the rundown neighborhood that Twitter is being given tax benefits to help revitalize.

The new office isn’t set to house Twitter’s staff until mid-2012. Renovations started a few months ago. (Maybe we’ll get to wear hard hats!)

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey are both scheduled to speak. We’ll update you when we know more.

Kleiner Perkins has nabbed former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, who left the social communications company less than two months ago to be an entrepreneur in residence at Benchmark Capital.

(Well, that didn’t last long, Mike, but maybe the food was better at 2750 Sand Hill Road than at 2480 Sand Hill Road.)

In an interview this morning, Abbott said that he hopes to stay a VC for 20 years (yipes!), since it allows him to work closely with a wide range of entrepreneurs and also get a broad view across a spectrum of businesses.

“I am really energized about what’s been happening in a lot of places like software,” he said. “From my experience, I think I bring a lot of differentiation for the companies Kleiner is invested in.”

And tech cred too. “We think engineers will be thrilled to have access to Mike and he’s a magnet for talent,” said Kleiner partner Ted Schlein, who compared him to all the comic-book heroes, The Avengers, in one person. “Mike is multi-faceted.”

Abbott was indeed a high-profile hire for Twitter a little over a year ago from Palm, where he served as head of its software and services, in charge of its webOS mobile platform.

He was brought in to provide a level of discipline and reliability to the Twitter communications platform and service, which had been plagued by persistent outages that made the Fail Whale infamous.

Abbott will focus on social, mobile and cloud investments at the well-known Silicon Valley venture firm while working on a team that includes high-profile players Mary Meeker and Bing Gordon.

Here’s the official press release:

Michael Abbott Joins Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as Partner

Engineering Leader to Help Social, Mobile and Cloud Entrepreneurs Build Teams and Ventures

MENLO PARK, Calif., December 1, 2011 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced that Mike Abbott, former vice president of engineering at Twitter, has joined the firm as a partner on its digital team. Abbott led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft. With a deep background in social and mobile applications and infrastructure, Mike is also an expert in enterprise infrastructure and cloud computing and “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software, and advised Cloudera and Jawbone.

“I’m excited to join KPCB’s partners to build new ventures faster,” said Abbott. “The partner mix of founders, operators and investors is ideal for entrepreneurs racing to scale at this disruptive time.”

“Mike is an exceptional and well-respected leader with an outstanding track record shipping great products,” said Ted Schlein, partner, KPCB. “Mike’s deep expertise from Palm and Twitter will help social, mobile and cloud entrepreneurs win.”

Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, said, “Mike is a huge engineering talent and will be a terrific asset to Kleiner’s technology companies. He was instrumental in helping us scale Twitter’s architecture to support incredible growth ̶ from 100 million daily Tweets in January 2011 to about 250 million daily tweets today.”

In less than a year and a half, Abbott grew the Twitter engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in an intensely competitive recruiting market. Abbott’s team rebuilt and solidified Twitter’s infrastructure. Prior to joining Twitter in 2010, Abbott led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Abbott was previously the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. Prior to that, he co-founded Passenger Inc. and founded Composite Software. Abbott has advised and invested in numerous software companies such as Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Saynow and Jawbone.

Mike Abbott is just the third senior KPCB partner added in three years, joining Bing Gordon and Mary Meeker, each with exceptional records serving mobile, social and cloud entrepreneurs. KPCB’s digital team also bolstered its infrastructure expertise with the recent addition of Ray Bradford from Amazon Web Services, where he helped grow the company’s cloud database business.

“The iOS integration is going to be absolutely huge for us, even better than we thought it was,” Costolo said.

“I didn’t realize how frictionless this would be,” he added. “It’s so native.”

Costolo, speaking in an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, pushed aside a question about why Apple partnered with Twitter instead of the larger social competitor Facebook. But he said Twitter and Apple share a similar product mentality of enhancing products by editing them down, and “offering simplicity in a world of complexity.”

In response to audience questions, Costolo said that Twitter would consider sharing revenue with “a narrow set of publishers”; that he didn’t know whether Twitter and Google could find a way to work together on real-time search again; and that Twitter’s search engineers are currently focused on tweet discovery rather than deep archive search.

Twitter users now create nearly 250 million tweets per day, Costolo said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin paid tribute to Jobs’s “passion for excellence,” while co-founder and CEO Larry Page said he appreciated Jobs’s advice past and present.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said in an emailed statement:

Today is very sad for all of us. Steve defined a generation of style and technology that’s unlikely to be matched again. Steve was so charismatically brilliant that he inspired people to do the impossible, and he will be remembered as the greatest computer innovator in history.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thanked Jobs for being “a mentor and a friend.”

Here’s his status message:

Pixar’s John Lasseter and Ed Catmull said:

Steve Jobs was an extraordinary visionary, our very dear friend and the guiding light of the Pixar family. He saw the potential of what Pixar could be before the rest of us, and beyond what anyone ever imagined. Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply ‘make it great.’ He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar’s DNA. Our hearts go out to his wife Laurene and their children during this incredibly difficult time.

Here’s Disney CEO Bob Iger’s statement:

Steve Jobs was a great friend as well as a trusted advisor. His legacy will extend far beyond the products he created or the businesses he built. It will be the millions of people he inspired, the lives he changed, and the culture he defined. Steve was such an “original,” with a thoroughly creative, imaginative mind that defined an era. Despite all he accomplished, it feels like he was just getting started. With his passing the world has lost a rare original, Disney has lost a member of our family, and I have lost a great friend. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Laurene and his children during this difficult time.

In a tweet, AOL co-founder Steve Case called Jobs “the most innovative entrepreneur of our generation.”

I feel honored to have known Steve Jobs. He was the most innovative entrepreneur of our generation. His legacy will live on for the ages.

October 5, 2011 4:36 pm via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite

@SteveCase

Steve Case

Bill Gates said: “I will miss Steve immensely.”

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tweeted that Jobs had gone beyond raising the bar.

Once in a rare while, somebody comes along who doesnt just raise the bar, they create an entirely new standard of measurement. #RIPSteveJobs

October 5, 2011 4:58 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@dickc

dick costolo

Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen said in an emailed statement, “Steve was the shining light of our industry — he showed us what was possible … He set the bar.”

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said:

The entire Time Warner family mourns the loss of Steve Jobs. The world is a better place because of Steve, and the stories our company tells have been made richer by the products he created. He was a dynamic and fearless competitor, collaborator, and friend. In a society that has seen incredible technological innovation during our lifetimes, Steve may be the one true icon whose legacy will be remembered for a thousand years.

RIAA CEO Cary Sherman said:

Like all music fans, we are saddened to hear of the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was a larger-than-life personality — passionate about music and one of its biggest fans and advocates. He was a true visionary who forever transformed how fans access and enjoy music. With the introduction of the iTunes software and other platforms, Steve and Apple made it once again easy and accepted to pay for music. His legacy will live on, long past his all-too-short time on earth.

New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg said:

Tonight, America lost a genius who will be remembered with Edison and Einstein, and whose ideas will shape the world for generations to come. Again and again over the last four decades, Steve Jobs saw the future and brought it to life long before most people could even see the horizon. And Steve’s passionate belief in the power of technology to transform the way we live brought us more than smart phones and iPads: it brought knowledge and power that is reshaping the face of civilization. In New York City’s government, everyone from street construction inspectors to NYPD detectives have harnessed Apple’s products to do their jobs more efficiently and intuitively. Tonight our City — a city that has always had such respect and admiration for creative genius — joins with people around the planet in remembering a great man and keeping Laurene and the rest of the Jobs family in our thoughts and prayers.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello said:

Steve was one of a kind. For many of us working in technology and entertainment, Steve was a new kind of hero that lead with big, bold moves and would not settle for less than perfection. He is the best role model for a leader that aspires to be great.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch:

Today, we lost one of the most influential thinkers, creators and entrepreneurs of all time. Steve Jobs was simply the greatest CEO of his generation. While I am deeply saddened by his passing, I’m reminded of the stunning impact he had in revolutionizing the way people consume media and entertainment. My heart goes out to his family and to everyone who had the opportunity to work beside him in bringing his many visions to life.

Warren Buffett said: “He was one of the most remarkable business managers and innovators in american business history.”

Former Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz (full interview at the Wall Street Journal):

It’s the ultimate sadness … He was a very special person, and he didn’t get to where he was by having people like him all the time. He got to where he was because he had a vision and a purpose. It’s easy to try and please everyone, but he kept to his principles.

AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson:

We are saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs. Steve was an iconic inventor, visionary, and entrepreneur, and we had the privilege to know him as partner and friend. All of us at AT&T offer our thoughts and prayers to Steve’s wife, family, and his Apple family.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer:

I want to express my deepest condolences at the passing of Steve Jobs, one of the founders of our industry and a true visionary. My heart goes out to his family, everyone at Apple and everyone who has been touched by his work.

Google has posted a Jobs memorial on its homepage:

Conde Nast President Bob Sauerberg:

Steve was a great visionary and innovator. He invented paid digital content and we are grateful for that. His products over the years have been key in the development of high quality Conde Nast content. Our companies have always be aligned on unique design and high quality. Conde Nast sends sincere sympathy to his family and our friends at Apple.

Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, co-chiefs of BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, said:

“Steve Jobs was a great visionary and a respected competitor. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and to all of the employees of Apple.”

Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman said:

“Steve Jobs was an iconic entrepreneur and businessman whose impact on technology was felt beyond Silicon Valley. He will be remembered for the innovation he brought to market and the inspiration he brought to the world.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said:

“Steve was a teacher to anyone paying attention, and today is a very sad day for everyone who cares about innovation and high standards.”

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Steve Jobs Full Coverage »

I made a note to myself: “Look up ‘data miner,’” not realizing how hard it might be to find until I dropped the “e.”

After another Twitter executive mentioned DataMinr in a recent conversation, I decided I had to get in contact with this company. I eventually found my way to Ted Bailey, the company’s founder and CEO.

Bailey was a bit coy, but he did tell me a little more about what he’s doing. DataMinr is a “global sensor network for emerging events and consumer signals,” Bailey said.

The service detects emerging events on Twitter by watching for activity that’s abnormal from the usual tweet flow. What DataMinr does is more powerful than a Twitter dashboard tool, Bailey contended, because it is based on studying patterns rather than tracking keywords.

Twitter Director of Platform Ryan Sarver was more than happy to give a quote about how much Twitter loves DataMinr:

“DataMinr is a great example of a company that’s creating a sizable business by unlocking value from realtime Twitter data and uncovering market insights in a way that was never possible before. We’d love to see more companies in Twitter’s ecosystem doing innovative analytics work like this. The opportunity is enormous to help brands, publishers and other large organizations get the best out of Twitter.”

As for why Twitter has taken such a liking to this particular little company? Bailey theorized, “We’re one of the most serious things that’s pulled out of Twitter — ‘serious’ in quotes.” Plus, DataMinr’s customers — governments and hedge funds — are dramatically different from Twitter’s own.

DataMinr has 12 employees, Bailey said, and has raised $5 million so far.

Here’s a video of Bailey from a Twitter developer showcase (yup, another place they gave him a plug) explaining how DataMinr sent out an alert about Osama bin Laden’s death — 23 minutes before it was reported in the news — that was based on only 19 tweets.

Chart of bin Laden tweets per second via Twitter on Flickr.

These days, 45 percent of Twitter’s 230 million tweets per day originate from mobile devices, according to Michael Abbott, Twitter’s VP of engineering.

And SMS, Twitter’s original platform, continues to contribute. Twitter users send and receive four billion texts per day, Abbott said, speaking at GigaOM’s Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Twitter’s fortunes are likely to get even more mobile as both Windows Phone and Apple’s latest version of iOS build Twitter directly into the operating system.

Abbott said he hopes Twitter will become more competitive with Facebook’s dominant role in authenticating apps. “I think it would be a good thing for the Web,” Abbott said.

As Facebook adds features, Twitter’s approach will be to narrow and unify its user experience, Abbott said, echoing his boss Dick Costolo’s recent public statements about Twitter simplicity.

Abbott, who led webOS development at Palm, was also pressed to talk about the soap opera around HP. Abbott declined to muse on who might buy the operating system from Hewlett Packard.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “The landscape is changing so dramatically.”

But he said he thinks webOS innovations around notifications and multitasking will continue to impact the mobile world.

As for which mobile platform he sees as the No. 3 player behind iOS and Android, Abbott declined to name another operating system, saying he would go with the mobile Web as the next most important platform.

Costolo said 40 percent of active users don’t create their own tweets, just read other people’s.

So that means many people read tweets but don’t create them, and in addition to that many more aren’t even logged in when they visit Twitter.com.

All these numbers are up significantly from the beginning of the year, Costolo said. In January, Twitter had just 250 million monthly visitors. Mobile usage seems to be a significant driver: 55 percent of active users access mobile Twitter products.

Costolo said his product goals are simplicity, tightening feedback loops, and surfacing content. But it’s a balance between maintaining the volume of the “roar of the crowd” as well as the most relevant and interesting bits, something he expects his product team to iterate on.

He said the reason Twitter hasn’t been forthcoming with these long-anticipated stats is because they would only be “partial,” and Twitter wanted to give a fuller story. And the reason the company hasn’t improved its products as much as people would have expected is because it had to get its infrastructure in order.

That infrastructure work is now done. So when a recent Sunday produced a record 8,900 tweets per second through the combination of buzzy topics like Hurricane Irene, a Manchester United win, Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement and other normal tweeting, Twitter didn’t even notice the record had been set until the next morning.

Costolo said Twitter has been careful to develop its business because “we didn’t want to do anything that optimized for near-term revenue at the expense of the experience.” But promoted tweets will now be syndicated to all platform products, he said.

He touted the ad products’ engagement rates and mentioned a recent Virgin America campaign that with one tweet resulted in the airline’s fifth-largest sales day ever. He also said Twitter’s recent massive funding round will keep it from worrying about IPO windows and the like.

Versus competition from Google+ and others, Costolo maintained that Twitter’s approach will be to differentiate through its simplicity. “We’re thinking of Twitter as how can we simplify the product even further, what can we edit out,” he said.

Regarding the ongoing debate around whether users should be required to give their real names on social networks — which Twitter does not — Costolo said, “We’re not wedded to pseudonyms; we’re wedded to letting people use the service in the way they see fit.”

Costolo reiterated that he sees opportunities for Twitter ecosystem developers to focus on things like data mining rather than Twitter clients. “We don’t anticipate taking equity positions in Twitter ecosystem companies,” he said. “But we will need the Buddy Media to Facebook, the Clickable to Google.”

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.

But I find that it’s easier than ever to be fully informed about What Was On The Teevee Last Night without ever turning on the set. Twitter, in particular, is good/bad about this — even if I have no interest in, say, last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, my feed makes sure I’ve got all the relevant info.

In case your Twitterfeed doesn’t look like mine, there were two big take-aways:

A) Beyonce looks pregnant and is encouraging everyone to believe that this is the case.

B) Adele, the only person in the world who is selling lots of recorded music these days, gave the night’s best performance.

Obligatory digital media business notes:

• The part where Twitter gives me the ability to learn about stuff that happened 12 hours ago is a little different from Twitter’s current pitch to TV programmers and advertisers. Dick Costolo and company like to argue that Twitter makes live TV more essential. The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive — it’s possible that Twitter actually does boost live TV ratings at the same time it makes catch-up easier — but since there’s a lot less money in the catch-up business than in the live TV business (see: Hulu) you won’t hear much about that.
• Easy to forget, but true — MTV parent Viacom is still suing Google and YouTube. Which means that the clip I provided above should be hard to find, at the very least. But this one popped up as the second result under “Adele” on YouTube this morning.

You probably know this, but ESPN star Bill Simmons — the guy they built an entire site for — is a big Twitter user. He has some free advice today about things he’d like changed/added. I concur! Let’s make it happen, ok? Thanks.

Via Grantland:

I can’t believe Twitter hasn’t added one of the following two wrinkles …

a. Adding a checklist to your follower list so you could follow however many people you want, but “check” the ones you want to actually show up in your feed. This would prevent wounded feelings (if you’re not following a friend who’s secretly bitter that you’re not following them, which means either they tweet too much or their tweets suck) and clogged Twitter feeds (if you have a couple of friends who post 40 to 50 times a day and clog your feed up, only you can’t unfollow them because they’re your friends).

b. Adding a button so you can make your follower list private. Do you realize how many more porn stars, strippers and hoochie mamas would be followed by athletes and rappers if nobody could see whom they were following? (Well, not you, Amar’e Stoudemire, you obviously don’t care. I’m talking about everyone else.) Do you realize how much more DM-inspired casual sex could be going down? You’re cheating the condom industry, child alimony lawyers and sports blogs, Twitter. Get your act together.

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.

What that means to advertisers: They’ll now have an improved chance to get their messages directly in front of some users, by inserting ads directly into their main “timelines.”

What that means to users: Depends. Marketers will only be able to deliver the ads — which will use the “Promoted Tweet” format the company rolled out more than a year ago — to users who already follow them on the service. And they’ll only appear on Twitter’s main Twitter.com site.

So if you don’t follow any brands/marketers/companies on Twitter, you won’t see the ads. And if you’re checking Twitter on your iPhone, or via clients like TweetDeck, you won’t see them there, either.

Here’s how Twitter described it to advertisers:

UPDATE: Here’s Twitter’s blog post about the new ads — or, if you prefer, new ad delivery system.

One important note is that even this program can’t guarantee that an advertiser’s message will reach their followers. That’s because Twitter will only show a certain number of Promoted Tweets using this system, and Twitter will use a bid/exchange system on the back-end, which incorporates both pricing and “relevance” into picking a winner.

As I noted earlier this month, delivering ads into users’s main timelines has been on Twitter’s agenda since April 2010. But this move doesn’t get them all the way there. Eventually, CEO Dick Costolo and company want to deliver ads to users who aren’t following particular companies by using targeting that finds likely recipients.

That is, Twitter wants a way for Starbucks to reach me even if I don’t follow the company, or any other coffee-related companies on the service. You know — just like lots of Web advertising works (or is supposed to work).

The fact that the company has been slow to do that is telling, I think — it shows that they’re quite content to move slowly on ads, despite the braying of outsiders (sometimes including me). Then again, when they’ve got outside investors lining up to spend $800 million on a $8 billion round, that confidence is a little easier to come by.

This isn’t the equivalent of Google’s AdWords, which was Twitter’s original intention when it started its ad platform a year ago. But Twitter may not need that kind of magic bullet to make this thing work — Facebook hasn’t found one, and things are working out okay over there.