First things first, for those emailing me frantically about getting into our D@CES onstage interview event later today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: We’re sold out and have a very long wait list.

That said, people in Sin City tend to flake out, so if you show up at the Marcello Ballroom at the Venetian Hotel at 3 pm, you might snag a seat, as people did last year at the same event.

No guarantees, but it’s a betting town, so you might want to do so.

And, if you throw craps, our crack All Things Digital staff will be posting photos, reports and video quickly.

I am hoping there will be some juicy news for them to chew on, as we interview three fascinating subjects:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer browser team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Our latest event comes after our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference, part of the D: All Things Digital juggernaut.

(Actually, it is more like a tiny red wagon, but it is really cool.)

This is our second D event at the CES, which is taking place this week.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

As usual, our event will be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

The D@CES program is only this afternoon, with the new trio.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real, live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

As noted before, I will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

So get ready for some fun–after all, it’s Vegas, baby.

In one memorable episode of the famous old short films “The Little Rascals,” after not getting invited to a party, the Our Gang little dudes decided to form their own group, comically called “The He-Man Woman-Haters Club.”

In other words: No girls allowed!

While it was wink-wink cute when Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat huffed and puffed about keeping out Darla–which they never ever could do–back in the last century, it’s not quite as adorkable when it comes to the boards of all the major Web 2.0 hotshots these days.

That would be Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and Foursquare, none of which have any women as directors.

As in zero.

What’s most remarkable is that most of these start-ups are run by what I consider enlightened and open-minded entrepreneurs, mostly young enough to be part of a generation more inclined to value equality and diversity in the workplace.

In addition, each of these companies has a massive base of women consumers, in some cases well over 50 percent of its audience.

Thus, it would seem logical that in casting about for those to help guide these companies, one or two women leaders might slip in.

To be fair, it’s not for lack of trying, but of completion, as was the case with Twitter’s recent addition of three new board members.

They were longtime Silicon Valley exec Peter Currie, Flipboard CEO and co-founder Mike McCue and former DoubleClick leader David Rosenblatt.

All are deeply qualified for the Twitter board, which is obviously prepping for its next stage of growth and maturity.

But in its search, the San Francisco microblogging site did not manage to cast the net quite wide enough.

While sources said at least one prominent online woman exec was considered, there were some legitimate issues with her appointment, and it was not completed.

Still, one might imagine Twitter could have tried harder to find other workable choices.

Currently, the Twitter board is made up of the new trio, as well as Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, CEO Dick Costolo and co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey.

Things are not any better over at Facebook, which has several prominent women execs running the show, most especially its high-profile COO Sheryl Sandberg.

But, inexplicably, though she does attend board meetings, she is not yet a director of Facebook, nor is any other woman.

In fact, here is Sandberg on topic at a recent TED event for women, in an eloquent speech titled “Why We Have So Few Women Leaders”:

Instead, the Facebook board is all men, all the time, composed of CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, prominent techie and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, investor Peter Thiel, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer and Washington Post head Don Graham.

It is no better at three of the most prominent recent Web 2.0 start-ups, which one source attributes to the lack of woman VCs, who are often the first board members after major investment rounds.

At Zynga, the hot social gaming company in San Francisco, it continues, with an all-male board, despite a very heavily female audience for its casual social games.

That would be co-founder and CEO Mark Pincus, COO Owen Van Natta, investor Bing Gordon of Kleiner Perkins, investor Reid Hoffman and Brad Feld of the Foundry Group.

The same is true at woman-targeted–spas, spas and more spas–social buying site Groupon, which has an unusually large board for a start-up and made up of–as per usual–all men.

The list: Co-founder and CEO Andrew Mason, Accel Partners’ Kevin Efrusy, former AT&T President and COO John Walter, New Enterprise Associates’ Harry Weller and Peter Barris, former AOL exec Ted Leonsis, 37Signals co-founder Jason Fried and early investors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.

And, much smaller, is Foursquare’s board, which is the trio of co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley, co-founder Naveen Selvadurai and Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger.

New investors–Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures’ Bryce Roberts–have observer status and both are, needless to say, dudes.

There is no question it is tough to make sure there is a good balance of qualified women leaders to men in tech–it is an issue we wrestle with every single year for the program of speakers at our own All Things Digital conference, although we are most excellent on this issue on our Web site and conference staff.

But it can be done, especially at public tech companies. Google has two women on its board of nine directors; Yahoo has three of 10; even Oracle has two of a dozen.

But a grand total of zero at the leading companies of Web 2.0 is not just a coincidence.

It’s a shame.

Tomorrow, BoomTown will post a list of great women who would be superb directors for any of these companies, but until then, let’s not follow in Spanky’s steps:

Yesterday, star venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins forked over $150 million in funding to Twitter.

At at $3.7 billion valuation, that got him a big chunk of the San Francisco microblogging site.

But what it didn’t get him was a seat on the board of Twitter, which many figured he would be given for after handing over so much moolah.

According to sources familiar with the situation, that’s due to Doerr’s being a director on another board: Google.

Several sources who BoomTown spoke to, after breaking news of the massive funding, said that his being on the board of the search giant was seen as too much of a conflict of interest.

A conflict because Google has plans to wade deeply into the social space. And also, of course, because it is the No. 1 potential acquirer of Twitter, as the Silicon Valley company seeks to gather more tools to fight its latest rival, Facebook.

Doerr has very deep ties at Google, having been on its board since mid-1999.

He got that seat, along with Sequoia Capital’s Mike Moritz, after he ponied up a critical $25 million equity round for Google in June of that year.

Interestingly, no other Kleiner partner was named to a Twitter board seat either.

But, some speculate, it might make sense for Mary Meeker–who just joined Kleiner to head up digital investing efforts, after a long-time stint as a Wall Street analyst for Morgan Stanley–to eventually become a Twitter director.

Meeker has, of course, deep IPO and M&A experience.

And, frankly, after adding Flipboard’s Mike McCue and former DoubleClick exec David Rosenblatt yesterday and former Netscape exec Peter Currie recently to its all-boy board band, a woman director might be a good idea to consider.

Other directors at Twitter include Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, Co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

I reached out to Doerr for a comment, but he has not yet replied; Twitter declined to comment.

Even more interesting to consider is what Kleiner will invest in next after this mega-funding, given how aggressively many sources said Doerr had pushed to lead the Twitter round.

And, in fact, sources said that Kleiner is looking closely at new funding rounds for both the Spotify music streaming service and Groupon, the social buying start-up that recently decided to turn down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google and an earlier $3 billion one from Yahoo.

Groupon is now seeking more funds to remain independent and hold onto its lead in the fast-growing local discounting market, sources said.

(Bloomberg also reported on Groupon’s new fundraising efforts, although it was written about after it turned down the Google offer.)

And Spotify, which is hugely popular outside the U.S., is trying to enter this market, but needs more funding to expand and perhaps strike better deals with music labels.

Both are the just the kind of companies Doerr has targeted in what looks like a serious effort to compete with other firms–especially Andreessen Horowitz and Russia’s DST Global.

They have garnered the heat Kleiner used to have, largely by backing more of the top entrepreneurs recently.

Doerr has already put money into social gaming phenom Zynga and also started an sFund for social-focused investments.

Add Twitter to the pile and you can see where this is headed: Except for the board seat, John Doerr will no longer be denied.

After our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week, the D: All Things Digital train keeps chugging away and is now headed to Las Vegas just after the new year.

There, we will do a second D event at the Consumer Electronics Show, which will take place from January 6 to 9, 2011.

It will, natch, be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

Unlike our other conferences, the D@CES program is only one afternoon, on Friday, January 7, at the Venetian’s Marcello ballroom, followed by a party at the hotel’s V Bar.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

This year, the trio will be: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real-live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

BoomTown will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

D@CES is invitation only, but if you want to go, email me at Kara@AllThingsD.com and I will send an invite, as long as supplies last.

Goldman offered the news in a conversation at LeWeb, saying he’d maintain an advisory role, that he’s not leaving to start something new, that he’s not going to Facebook or Google and that he just needs “a bit of a break.”

Twitter has no lack of product leaders, including co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams, who recently relinquished the top job to make room for former COO Dick Costolo. Goldman had been a close friend of Williams, having first joined him as business manager of blogging software maker Pyra Labs, before it was bought by Google in 2003. Goldman has led product at Twitter since 2007.

Following Goldman’s departure announcement, a company spokeswoman said that Williams “is going to continue in his co-founder role and help with product vision.” She said that it was not yet clear whether the new head of product management would be an internal or external hire.

But, no surprise, sources familiar with the situation said Williams will likely assume the top product role, as it’s the best-fitting landing place for him at the company. The Twitter service was originally created in 2006 by company co-founder and Chairman Jack Dorsey and others when Williams was CEO of a previous start-up called Odeo. Dorsey left his operating role at Twitter in 2008 when Williams replaced him as CEO.

As the company verges on raising funding that would value the company at $3.5 to $4 billion, the departure of Goldman seems to underscore an issue that has plagued Twitter for a long time: Product development.

Aside from its well-documented reliability problems, new products and major upgrades at Twitter are few and far between.

While it is clear the people who founded and now lead Twitter have been passionate and visionary about personal expression and information-sharing in its simplest form, many techies say they are given pause by Twitter’s deficit of innovation since its first and most powerful iteration.

They assert that Twitter’s product launches to date–retweets, lists, some apps and its #newtwitter Web interface–are minor complements to the simple messaging system. In a tech culture that values shiny new toys, multiple people have said to me that Twitter is the least innovative of any other Internet contemporary.

For example, Twitter still doesn’t offer image hosting or its own link shortener, and still has yet to fully incorporate the search service Summize, which it bought in 2008. Perhaps that’s out of concern for displacing and angering its developer corps of companies, like Bit.ly, but since 25 percent of Tweets contain links, it seems obvious that Twitter should help its users shorten them to help fit into its 140-character limit.

The company tried to set a firm road map last April at Chirp, its first developer conference (pictured at left, the dudes of Twitter held a jokey Q&A session at Chirp).

But since then, eagerly awaited products like “Annotations” (a way to add more information to Tweets) have been delayed as the company concentrated on dealing with World Cup traffic and the release of its new Web site. Twitter is hiring as fast as it can, with its ballooning employee count, now at 325, relatively small for a product now used by eight percent of American online adults.

Still, many laud the sleek new Twitter Web site–for which Goldman, Williams and product manager Kevin Cheng led development. It was rolled out to admirable acclaim and user satisfaction.

But Twitter has only a few weeks to shuffle things around before it launches into the new year with no formal leader of its product team.

According to sources close to the situation, well-known Silicon Valley power player Peter Currie is joining the board of directors of Twitter.

It’s an interesting choice to bring the well-regarded moneyman to the microblogging start-up, and could indicate an intent to push to an IPO eventually.

As first reported by NetworkEffect’s Liz Gannes earlier this week, Twitter is now considering funding offers from big venture funds, specifically Russia’s DST Global and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins, as well as fielding incoming acquisition interest from Google and Facebook.

Currie should know about this kind of noisy swirl around a hot start-up.

Back in the heyday of Web 1.0, as the CFO of Netscape Communications, he led the iconic browser software company into history, as the first great Internet rocket ship, when it went public on August 9, 1995.

While the Netscape experience ended in tears, Currie’s career has not, and he has become a kind of go-to elder statesman in the Web 2.0 era.

A year ago, for example, he joined Facebook as its temporary CFO.

That move came after the social networking site, in a bit of turmoil, parted ways with its then CFO, Gideon Yu, following mutual disagreements.

Indeed, Currie plays the calm, collected wise man well.

Unusually tall, aggressively avuncular and laid-back, he loves Elvis and enjoys pranking reporters like BoomTown.

(Case in point: Back in the day, he spread the rumor around Silicon Valley that I was short due to a medical condition.)

Now the president of Currie Capital, a private investment firm, he had previously worked at General Atlantic in private equity.

After Netscape, he was a partner and co-founder of the Barksdale Group, an early-stage (and ill-fated) venture capital firm.

Before Netscape, he was CFO of McCaw Cellular Communications and also worked at Morgan Stanley.

Currie is also board-happy, serving as a director of a variety of tech firms, private and public, which have had varying degrees of success.

They have included CNET, Critical Path, Clearwire, Safeco, Ofoto, Tellme Networks and Zantaz, as well as Sun Microsystems.

He has an MBA from Stanford University and went to Williams College.

In other words, just the kind of pedigree needed to give some additional burnish to the Twitter board, which now includes Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet, Benchmark Capital’s Peter Fenton, co-founder and former CEO Evan Williams, co-founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo.

Apparently, it’s time to toss another dude in there!

Twitter caught some undeserved flack over the holiday weekend, after CEO Dick Costolo told a reporter for the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper he is “working on clarity” around Twitter’s ultimate purpose.

The story garnered the unfortunate headline: “Twitter lacks ‘clear long term vision’ admits new CEO.”

The full Costolo quote was more reasonable and simply defined his job:

“I am working on clarity around that at the moment. I am currently trying to define what Twitter’s purpose is in the long term. We will be able to be more specific on that answer in the near future.”

In fact, it’s more like the present for the popular San Francisco-based microblogging service, which sources said has been wrestling with several lucrative scenarios over the last several weeks, including acquisition interest from both Google and Facebook and also a number of favorably termed major funding offers.

The big push is coming from DST Global, as this site reported a month ago, which was clearly implied by both DST’s Yuri Milner and Twitter’s Evan Williams in onstage interviews at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco earlier this month.

In a recent visit to Twitter’s downtown HQ, sources said, Milner underscored DST’s generous funding offer to top execs.

Sources said DST, which has made big investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, has offered over $100 million to Twitter at a valuation closing in on $4 billion.

It’s a move to shut out others, apparently, including, more recently, Kleiner Perkins–specifically its well-known John Doerr, who has been angling to move the venture firm more squarely into the social space.

After scoring a late entry to the social scene with its investment in the fast-growing Zynga, Kleiner has made a big marketing push recently to allocate a dedicated $250 million “sFund” to social start-ups.

Also reportedly interested in the deal are Andreessen Horowitz, which this summer outplayed and outlasted other VC firms and potential acquirers to get a piece of Foursquare.

Not surprisingly, Twitter has also been on the receiving end of serious look-sees in recent weeks from both Google and Facebook, according to sources, although there has not been an actual term sheet presented from either party. Those valuations for an acquisition have been well above $5 billion.

Of course, the interest in Twitter has been ongoing for a while from both the search giant, which has struggled in the social space, and the social networking giant. (And meanwhile, Google is also looking at buying Groupon.)

In late 2008, for example, Facebook tried to buy Twitter for $500 million in cash and stock, an offer Twitter rejected at the time.

Former CEO and Co-founder Evan Williams was behind the decision to go big rather than sell out then.

He turned down the deal after sleeping on it, penning a long email about “why there’s still so much we have left to do,” which Twitter investor Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital recently told the New York Times was “inspiring.”

Inspiring or not, Twitter’s board would have to seriously consider the landscape again if there was another massive offer for the company.

And, if a bidding war were to happen, Facebook seems unlikely to win versus Google. A deal costing billions of dollars would be dramatically different and more difficult than the “acqhire” talent strategy Facebook has employed to date. For Facebook, the biggest upside of deal would simply be beating Google.

Raising a monster round would be in keeping with Twitter’s short history so far.

In the fall of 2009, the company raised funding at a $1 billion valuation, when it had about 50 million accounts, under 100 employees and had yet to secure its first major revenue stream through deals to deliver real-time data to Microsoft and Google.

As a company and a service, Twitter is growing quickly. But it still only has 325 employees today, serving its 175 million users.

Williams, who stepped down from the CEO job in October, played coy at Web 2.0 when asked about additional funding rounds, simply saying “We have a lot of money in the bank.”

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on its latest funding and acquisition options and Facebook said it had “nothing new to report” on the subject.

And Google, DST and Kleiner have not yet responded to requests for comment.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

[Image courtesy of Flickr user kristin_a (Meringue Bake Shop).]

Big Web CEO/very recently CEO Interviews:

The headliners for the Web crowd were Eric Schmidt of Google on day one, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook on day two and Evan Williams of Twitter on day three. None of the conversations were super revelatory, but they did highlight the heightening competitive tensions between Facebook and the rest of the Web.

Here’s the Zuckerberg video, which was notable for being one of his better public interviews in terms of ease and clarity (nothing like the near-fainting incident while being pummeled with privacy questions by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at D8).

Two good comments from Web 2.0: About giving Google access to Facebook user email addresses, Zuckerberg said, “I’m not sure we’re 100 percent right on this.” (For someone with his hubris, that’s practically an admission of guilt.) Zuckerberg also criticized the visualization of the Web as a map of territories that illustrated the Web 2.0 stage.

“Your map is wrong,” he said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory–this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.”

Here are Schmidt (already at 170,000 views!) and Williams.

Best panel:

The most captivating panel was the one with venture capitalists John Doerr and Fred Wilson, ably moderated by John Heilemann. Wilson argued that Google has bought all of its recent interesting products, saying its last in-house success was Gmail. “They haven’t home-built from the ground up anything interesting in a half decade,” he said. Doerr replied passionately, “Ideas are easy. What’s really dear is execution. Google executes. Facebook executes.”

Best start-up presentation:

Brian Pokorny, CEO of DailyBooth, explained how the young people who use his site to share pictures are having conversations with each other. Pokorny made an interesting distinction about how–unlike with other photo-sharing apps–his users choose to use the front-facing camera on the iPhone and iPod Touch so they can take pictures of themselves.

An evening talk by agent Ari Emanuel was also quite well-received, with many people mentioning it to me the next day. You can watch it here.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics
statement.

Williams says he will focus on “product strategy,” leaving Costolo to handle the nuts and bolts of the business Williams co-founded four years ago. This makes plenty of sense, because that’s essentially the way the company has been running for some time: Williams spent the past few months consumed with the new Twitter.com redesign, while Costolo has been in charge of everything else.

“I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build,” Williams writes in his note announcing the move, and that rings quite true: When I saw him in San Francisco last month, he was positively vibrating with pride over the new Twitter.com launch.

Internally, the team referred to the project as “Phoenix,” and the overdramatic code name gives you a sense of how much importance Williams and others placed on the redesign. It’s the first real product launch Twitter has put out in a long time.

But running Twitter is about a lot more than product now. It’s about scaling a team that’s already grown to 300 people. And it’s about figuring how to generate revenue to pay for all those bodies–and to satisfy investors’ very high expectations.

Outsiders haven’t gotten the sense that Williams has been that interested in that kind of stuff for quite some time, and there have been rumblings that Williams would need to take a different role sooner or later.

When Costolo came in from the outside to handle revenue and other non-product projects last year, this became an easy set of dots to connect.

(Actually, Costolo, who has a sense of humor honed as an improv comic in Chicago, did some of the dot-connecting himself a year ago: “First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power,” he tweeted back in September 2009. Thanks to Matt Barash for reminding us.)

Meanwhile, if you’re betting that Twitter ends up selling to a big guy–Google (GOOG) is really the only logical choice, though you could theoretically see Microsoft (MSFT) entering the fray–today’s move makes that option that much more likely.

Williams has already done the first hard part, by handing his company over to a professional manager. Handing the whole thing over to a new owner is a logical next step.

UPDATE: I ran that theory by Costolo and Williams. They disagree!

“I think it’s the opposite,” says Costolo, who argues that he’s taking over the company so that they can increase their chances of keeping it independent “for a long time.”

And Williams says he really does want to build more stuff, and he sounds convincing saying it.

“I never had any absolute ideas that I was or was not the long-term CEO. My goal has always been to play the role in the company that I thought was most important at the time,” he said.

I still think that role will be “guy who sells his company.” But happy to be wrong…

Here’s the text of Williams’s blog post announcing the change:

By all accounts Twitter is on a roll. We’ve redesigned our web site to great user feedback. Our user and usage numbers are growing at a rapid clip all around the world. We’ve launched an early, but successful, monetization effort. And, many top engineers, product designers, sales people and other key folks have joined our quickly growing team.

In fact, there are 300 people working at Twitter today–compared to about 20 when I took the CEO job two years ago. Back then, people were creating about 1.25 million tweets a day–compared to 90 million today. In those same two years, we grew from 3 million registered users to more than 160 million today.

The challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous. Growing big is not success, in itself. Success to us means meeting our potential as a profitable company that can retain its culture and user focus while having a positive impact on the world. This is no small task. I frequently reflect on the type of focus that is required from everyone at Twitter to get us there.

This led to a realization as we launched the new Twitter. I am most satisfied while pushing product direction. Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build.

This is why I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO. Starting today, I’ll be completely focused on product strategy.

When I insisted on bringing Dick into the COO role a year ago, I got a lot of questions from my board. But I knew Dick would be a strong compliment to me, and this has proven to be the case. During his year at Twitter, he has been a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office. Dick can be even more effective at this now because Ali Rowghani, Adam Bain, Mike Abbott, Katie Stanton and Kevin Thau joined our leadership team this year and are having a big impact. Given Dick’s track record as a three-time successful CEO, I’m confident we can make this a smooth transition.

I’m extremely proud of how far Twitter has come in the last two years. And, I couldn’t be more excited about where our amazing team will take it next.

The Twitter folks don’t exactly present it that way, of course. I talked to CEO Evan Williams and COO Dick Costolo earlier today, and they both repeated the mantra that the new Twitter is supposed to reflect the fact that Twitter is a “consumption environment,” where it’s just fine to read (or watch videos or look at pictures) instead of write.

In Williams’s words: “We’re trying to get people to understand that they don’t have to tweet if they want to get value out of Twitter.”

Which is another way of saying that Twitter is a media company: It gives you cool stuff to look at, you pay attention to what it shows you, and it rents out some of your attention to advertisers.

And that’s the real parallel with Facebook here. Not that both have inline video in the timeline or other design similarities, but that both companies started out trying to avoid the advertising business, and that both of them have ended up embracing them.

Nothing wrong with that, of course!

Speaking of which, how are Twitter’s new ad products coming along? Just great, says Costolo, who told me about engagement rates that pushed into the “double digits” for some of the company’s “Promoted Tweets” – and single digits for most of them. Which is way, way higher than traditional Web ads.

And Costolo says Twitter’s “Promoted Trends” product has been able to “boost the conversation” around given Twitter topics by as much as 600 percent.

The informal feedback I’ve heard is that advertisers are quite comfortable with Promoted Trends, since they function much like conventional display ads. But less so with the Promoted Tweets, which are sort of like Google’s AdWords but not really–unlike Google (GOOG), Twitter has very little idea of what’s on your mind.

But we’ll see: Costolo says Twitter will start pushing out the paid tweet ads more aggressively in the next few months.

Here’s a brief chat I had with Costolo before Twitter’s press event this afternoon, where we talk about the new site’s new features, the company’s ad plans and the inevitable “what will TweetDeck think of this” questions. Apologies once again for the horrendous video, but at least this time I have an excuse. I managed to lose my Flipcam en route to Twitter’s headquarters, so this one was shot with the BlackBerry Tour’s limited camera: