14 DAY TRIAL // Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Twitter cofounder and CEO Evan Williams answered some questions about the service ranging from the perennial business model ones to more tricky issues like the growth slowdown in the US for the past few months. While he did recognize several problems, he was optimistic about overcoming them, pointing out some of the solutions that are already in the works, like the upcoming Twitter Lits.
First up, the nagging revenue issue. Twitter has been doing well gaining new users and has so far shown little interest in the revenue side, despite claims that something like premium accounts for businesses will be launched this year. Williams says that, while the company does think about revenue, 97 percent of the efforts are geared towards improving the product and the service for now. He believes that with a better product revenue will also come and that focusing on money too much right now may hurt Twitter in the long run. Basically, the same answer Twitter has been giving for months now, but there wasn't any reason to expect anything else.
Twitter saw a meteoric rise in spring but things slowed down recently and traffic has pretty much stalled. The CEO admitted this much but said that he wasn't worried too much about the slowing and believed that new features like Lists would spur further growth. He also noted that Twitter was doing much better elsewhere in the world and also on the mobile front. Also related to the traffic is the user retention issue, which he also believed was a problem but not one that couldn't be fixed, again saying that the new features Twitter was working on should help with that.
Finally Williams revealed that the infamous Suggested Users Lists would be gone once the new grouping feature Lists makes its debut. "Lists enables new use cases, it drives discovery not only for new users, but for old users," he said. The feature, which allows users to group the ones they follow based on any criteria they want, has been in testing for a while now and should become available to the public shortly.