There's a thread of accidental anarchy in Biz Stone's masterclass. The Twitter co-founder started at art school and ended up on Twitter via a book publisher, web design, a blogging tool and a podcasting project. The common thread, he said, is creativity.
"Creativity is a renewable resource - it never runs out," he said.
"Creating an atmosphere where creativity is welcome is the bext thing you can do. We couldn't plan for Twitter stuff to happen - we got money for Odeo and Twitter happened. Even Blogger was a side project. There's no end to them."
Odeo was a podcasting project that Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, had been playing with at the time, but a demo of the product at a TED talk went down so well that they ended up with a New York Times feature and $5m in funding. The demo, Stone confesses, was better than the product.
"None of us were even using our own thing, the thing we were supposed to be excited about. We weren't even podcasters - we all listened to music on our iPods. We ended up feeling worried that we'd taken this money for Odeo but were starting to use it for Twitter."
API increases traffic 20-fold
If we needed any proof about the value of spin-off applications - like those that made Facebook great - Twitter has it.
The site gets 20 times more traffic because of its API, said co-founder Biz Stone, and also enables development of the product outside the company.
Users have suggested audio Twitter, video Twitter and any number of "kooky features", but they can "use the API and developer community as a way of avoiding adding features to the core system that shouldn't be there".
The priority for Twitter is performance and reliability for the service, he said, and that often means saying no. Right now, focusing on those priorities mean "saying no to everything, just so we can get things done".
Twitter really took off at the tech conference South by South West. "The best stuff always happens in the hallways," said Stone, so Twitter set up screens and filtered SXSW-relevant Twitters to delegates around the conference. The result was an obsessive following of people who used Twitter to coordinate socialising and "self-organising" around the event, and it continued to spiral from there.
Never mind the churn
How do you stop people leaving the service? "You don't," said Stone. "You recognise that is what people do, and plan and allow for that churn." That also means making it easy for people to move to another service if they want to.
Stone was asked about fickle social networkers, who might jump from xanga.com to MySpace to Facebook in a short period of time. But those are 'I'm here' services, said Stone, that want you to stay inside their sites. Twitter moves with you, physically, because of the SMS element.
There's a move towards enabling people to move more easily form one service to another, he said; in the early days of the web people resisted linking away to other sites, but then Google disrupted that by building a business that did nothing but link. "There's a value in sending them away because if you do a good enough job of sending them away, they will come back."
"We're a device-agnostic message-routing company"
So where's Twitter going? It just launched in India - which will be absolutely massive, and viral - but they will continue until either they don't like it anymore or it becomes too big.
They are speaking to carriers about working together on SMS packages, but that has taken an extraordinarily long time. And monetising Twitter is not a priority yet, though that would most likely be done by charging advertisers to send out messages to followers and by future deals with carriers.
"We don't see ourselves as a web company. We see ourselves as a device-agnostic message routing company, so we'd really like to recruit people from Reuters or Bloomberg to come and work for us. That's what we need to focus on."
Twitter's attitude towards the press is very different to that of Google, where Stone used to work. "No-one was ever allowed to say anything. Things would be handed out and they'd say 'here's what we're telling you. Be happy with that.'"
"We're very different. We've never put out any press releases. We just ask 'now what do you want to know?'"
