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Twitter: Newspapers Should Be ‘Radically Open’

Posted on: Friday, 20 November 2009, 07:05 CST

News organizations should be “radically open” if they wish to generate Internet revenue, according to Twitter founder Biz Stone.

I would "love to see what happens" if News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch moved forward with plans to block Google from his websites, Stone said.

"The future is in openness not [being] closed," he said during an interview with BBC news

Stone’s comments were in reference to recent remarks by Murdoch that search engines could not legally use content such as news headlines in search results.

Earlier this year, Murdoch said that News Corp., which owns the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the U.S. and the Times and Sun newspapers in Britain, would begin charging customers for access to its websites.

Mr. Stone said Murdoch should be allowed to "fail fast" with the idea.

"They should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed," Stone said during a recent event in London.

The social networking site Twitter has been an "open platform" since its founding, allowing outside developers to build their own applications and services for the site. These include search tools and services that allow users to add video and images to messages known as “tweets”.

Such openness has allowed Twitter to grow at an exponential rate, with the number of users increasing by 1,382% - from 475,000 to seven million – from February 2008 to February 2009, according to figures from Nielsen Online.

However, more recent data suggests the growth has leveled off, particularly in North America.

But Mr. Stone said his company is continuing to grow “very fast from an international and a mobile perspective."

Twitter’s traffic is difficult to quantify, since many users do not interact with the service through the website but rather through desktop software and mobile phones. A report released in June suggested that more than half of all updates were published using these devices.

"We're unique from an internet perspective in that our DNA is in mobile," Stone told BBC News.

"We started out in texting and then we brought the service to the web,” said Stone, adding that Twitter saw most of its growth on mobile phones.

"We see over four billion mobile phones active around the world as opposed to the 1.65 billion active web accounts, so when you look at this together you see a very broad potential for growth for Twitter.”

A leaked memo from the company earlier this year suggested it sought to achieve one billion users by 2013.

Nevertheless, critics question Twitter’s ability to generate revenue.

Earlier this year the firm secured $100m in funding, placing the company’s valuation at $1 billion, although it has yet to make a profit.

Mr. Stone said the firm would begin offering commercial services later this year to address the issue.

"One of the first things we are going to do explicitly is commercial accounts," he said.

"Twitter will always be free to everyone but you will be able to pay for an additional layer of access to learn more about your Twitter account - get some feedback, some analytics, become a better 'Twitterer'."

The company is also looking at "licensing and syndication possibilities,” Stone said.

"We can give away this real-time feed of data to other companies such as Google and Bing to give them a better experience for searching Twitter.”

But Mr. Stone acknowledged that Twitter was still finding its way.

"We are coming out of a very rapid growth over the last two years.”

"We have a lot of work to do."

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On the Net:

• Twitter

Source: RedOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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