As CEO, my main job is editor-in-chief.
Technology to me does two things: it increases the velocity of communication and increases the number of people who can participate. That’s it. That’s really all technology for our entire history has ever done.
Making something simple is very difficult.
Twitter is the world.
From a product standpoint, we want every touch point to feel magical. It inspires trust.
I’m less interested in how people are following each other and more interested in how they are following topics and tweets themselves. People are following more key words and concepts and more ideas and acting on those rather than individuals or organizations.
The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.
The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They’re combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.
I fell in love with flora of all types, especially ferns. Loved the sparse structure and repetition of shape – almost fractal.
I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.
Anything you’re interested in the world – whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop – they’re on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
I think Twitter is best when it sparks conversations elsewhere. To use YouTube and Facebook and all the tools we have available to us today to respond and also promote and answer and engage is awesome.
IM is interesting because you look at your buddy list and, at a glance, see what your friends are listening to, what they’re working on, what they’re doing. The problem was that you were bound to the computer keyboard.
A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it’s extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let’s make it’s easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
Pick a movement, pick a revolution and join it.
Twitter has been my life’s work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what’s going on in them right now.
I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it’s useless. It’s meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.
I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test.
Short term satisfaction will never lead to something timeless.
Sometimes the best edit is a complete rewrite.