I think of Twitter as a messaging system that you didn't know you needed until you had it. Think about when cell phones first started coming out. People said, "Why would I carry my phone around?" And now you'll drive back to your house thirty miles if you forget your cell phone.
I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.
When you think of a social network, you have these two-way interactions: "Are you my friend? Yes? No? Yes?" Like LinkedIn, it's business oriented, but it's all about establishing connections. You connect to me through my other connections, and that sort of thing, and you sort of define who your friends are. Twitter doesn't have that.
I think Twitter has brought something totally new to the table.
I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.
I think before Twitter people didn't think that way, not in any sort of meaningful or specific way, so what I'm trying to say, if we're trying a bunch of stuff, a lot of cool and great social stuff, a lot of platform stuff, then some of it will stick, and some of it will be junked over. Some of it will be just like the cell phone, you can't imagine not having it.
When you think about email or IMing, why aren't you writing back? I can see your avatar, I know you're online, why aren't you writing me back? But with Twitter, everybody sends their responses to Twitter, and Twitter then sends them out to everyone. So there's not this constant connection. You can be hyperconnected, then you can take a break for a couple days and it's fine.
We did Twitter, and Twitter grew so fast, and in 2006 we spun it out into Twitter, Inc.
You don't have to spend the entire day hunched over your computer consuming this information. Maybe, it is as simple as once in a while glancing down at the device that's invaluable to you or many reasons, catching up, or it lets you know when you should know something. But as these things get better and we get more connected in it, it will get more sophisticated.
Twitter provides a great amount of timely information, but we still need those people to fill out the rest of the story and the context.
I think that's a really important role that people sometimes forget about, especially with all these newspaper shutting down and having trouble, where are all these stories going to go? I think you have something really great with all those stories waiting to be told, but I just don't know how it shapes up exactly. I don't think there are going to be a lot of newspaper reporters sitting around not writing.
What if the New York Times gave out free, cheap Kindles to everyone and said this is how we're doing it now. You know? Maybe that's a way to go. The technology gets cheaper and cheaper, and at some point it has to be cheaper than all these trucks and all this gas, to just say, let's give away a Kindle to everyone.
I've seen people twitter in haiku only.
The future of marketing is philanthropy.
I started out as an artist, and I continue to think of myself as an artist first, and a technologist and entrepreneur after that.
In any leadership position, you're always going to be disappointing somebody.
If people are passionate about your product, whether it's because they're hating or loving it, those are both good scenarios.
Design is a career where you learn creative decision making.
The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.
We can figure it out, it's not like we all have a disease.
Embrace your constraints.
I never even graduated college. I never finished learning, as it were, and I have a psychological need to be in a learning environment at all times.
Both my wife and I have a lot of compassion for animals in general.
Creativity is a renewable resource.
You have to have an emotional investment in what you're doing. If you don't love what you're doing, failure is pretty much guaranteed.
