Twitter CEO Dorsey sees embeds, mobile in Twitter’s future
Despite the occasional late night hiccup, micro-messaging service Twitter has been largely stable for the past few weeks. It’s been refreshing to have the service working, some would say downright boring (as indicated by the calls for the Fail Whale) — so what’s next?
I’ve argued that it should be a serious move into the mobile sphere, while others are clamoring for monetization. Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey sat down with Vator.tv’s Bambi Francisco to talk about Twitter’s present and future. He revealed some interesting things, including:
- Dorsey wouldn’t put a number on the Twitter/Summize deal or on Twitter’s valuation after its latest funding round, but when Francisco asked “$100 million valuation?,” Dorsey just smiled and said, “that’s what people say.”
- Twitter is making some revenue, but not any money. This has been known for a while but is worth repeating. Twitter makes revenue from mobile carriers due to SMS usage. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that Dorsey is excited about the possibilities of SMS and Twitter. I, for one, still think SMS is one of the greatest rip-offs in the world of technology.
- Usage of the API is 20 times that of the main site’s web traffic. That site traffic has been going up very quickly so the API traffic must be huge.
- Of those sites and clients using the API, the desktop clients are the biggest in terms of usage.
- Dorsey says that Twitter always thought that mobile would be huge for Twitter, but that has not really been the case thus far (again, I refer you to my thoughts on Twitter mobile). “We could be better at that,” Dorsey says.
- Dorsey more or less says that embeds should be coming to Twitter. This means that if you were to paste a link to a YouTube video in your tweet (Twitter message), Twitter would recognize it and allow it to expand into an embed playable in the Twitter page or Twitter client. Pownce and FriendFeed have both been doing this since their inceptions, and I’ve been calling on Twitter to do this for a while. It will make for a richer experience within the Twitter community.
- Dorsey says that Twitter will not consider hosting its own videos. So, those hoping for an actual “Video Twitter” better get used to Seesmic or the newer startup 12seconds.
- On the topic of rivals, Twitter views services like FriendFeed as complimentary.
- Specifically on Identi.ca, the current flavor of the week for Twitter exiles, Dorsey says: “We’ve seen a lot of Twitter clones.”
- And finally towards the end Dorsey notes that he hopes Twitter will keep seeing “more and more mainstream usage.”
Monetization, Summize, mainstream usage, Twitter rivals/”killers”, uptime, valuation, Dorsey hit on it all. Watch the full video below. And if you still want more information on Twitter, check out USA Today’s feature on the company that is in the paper today.
You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha, Chris Morrison and Dan Kaplan. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.
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About the Author, MG Siegler
MG Siegler writes about technology trends and new media for VentureBeat, with a focus on mobile topics, social elements and key news stories. Before that, MG wrote about technology on his blog, ParisLemon. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan where he studied film. He's previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he did web development. He now lives in San Francisco.