Twitter Co-Founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams Tell Marketplace the Mechanics of Twitter and Their New Monetization Platform
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Twitter Co-Founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams Tell Marketplace the Mechanics of Twitter and Their New Monetization Platform
Full Audio and Transcript Available At: www.marketplace.org
LOS ANGELES , CA (July 8, 2010) In a joint interview, Twitter Co-Founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams caught up with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The interview will air TODAY, July 8, 2010 on local public radio stations. To find local stations and broadcast times, visit www.marketplace.org/about/stations . Complete audio of the interview is also available at www.marketplace.org
Interview highlights:
On the mechanics behind Twitter, and when it first took off, Evan says: "The metaphor that I like to use is that of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight. It looks so choreographed. It looks beautiful, it looks complicated, but it's not Ö it's basically rudimentary communication among individuals in real time allowing them to move as one organism, and that's what we saw people doing at this festival we went to, and that's when we realized we had something big."
Of Twitter's recently released monetization campaign, Biz says : "We've just recently begun launching our monetization platform, promoted tweets and promoted trends, which allow businesses to surface their tweets in front of more people."
Biz continues: "So promoted tweets is a tweet that would surface in search and we take it out of the chronological order and put it on topÖ What a company can do now is they can promote something that already people are talking about but maybe it didn't hit the top ten and we'll put it up there in that list."
Giving an example, Biz explains : "The first one we did was for Toy Story 3Ö Disney Pixar wanted to make sure people really saw that it was up there, so they promoted Toy Story 3 as a promoted trendî. Evans concludes, ìBy the way, not a bad box office opening."
All excerpts from the interview must be credited to Marketplace from American Public Media. Marketplace is public radio's daily magazine on business and economics news, hosted by Kai Ryssdal and reaching more than 5 million listeners weekly.