www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet -> www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/16/twitters-internal-strategy-laid-bare-to-be-the-pulse-of-the-planet/
handful of them only, and we've spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that. We'll have more to say on that process in a couple of days.
Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more. These are the last two documents we are going to share: a subset of the detailed notes from a set of executive meetings that took place between February 12 and June 9, 2009. What's interesting of the rest we are posting here with our commentary. These notes include never-before revealed discussions between Twitter and Google, Microsoft, and others, as well as details of product planning, company goals, employee retention, and new proposed terms of service and APIs. Even acquisition targets such as CoTweet and Twitpic are discussed (and sometimes dismissed). It's important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information - They aren't happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say (more on why they did that in our later post). One other caveat - as we've said before, these documents are rough meeting notes, not polished documents meant for broad consumption. But on the plus side, the rawness of it shows the dedication and deep commitment of this team to making Twitter into a world-class company. Finally, there are some details about partner discussions, particularly around Google and Microsoft, that we are just not going to publish. Twitter has been in negotiations with both companies around a broad set of transactions for months. But we aren't going to go into great detail about exactly what has been discussed, or Twitter's strategies toward those negotiations. So while it looks like there is a lot of detail around those discussions below, the most sensitive stuff has been removed. Let's start with a key strategy meeting which took place on February 25, 2009. One of the audacious goals laid out in the notes of the strategy meeting is for Twitter to become the first Web service to reach one billion users. The notes are laid out in bullet points with each one reading like a Tweet: "If we had a billion users, that will be the pulse of the planet." In the meeting itself, Stone tries to put his finger on what Twitter is by calling it more of a "nervous system" than an alert system.
In a March 13, 2009 management meeting, for example, during a discussion of a search deal with Google, the fear is expressed that "Google would kick our ass at finding the good tweet." But almost immediately afterwards, someone asks, "Can we do to google what google has done to others?" In a May 7 management meeting, Twitter's search syndication strategy with Google is discussed, as is the desire of "every tech company" to gain access to "Hosebird," an API Twitter is working on to deliver its full stream of Tweets to search partners and others. The attitude towards Google is cautious: "Playing with fire here where we know that Google is building the competitive product."
After an earlier two hour meeting with Google executives, the Twitter leadership had decided that an "agreement for some period of time makes sense - with our parameters." But at the same time, they resolved to that Twitter's own "search results page needs to be great - better than the landing pages on Google."
The company is also hard at work defining a new Terms of Service agreement which will launch in conjunction with new APIs. These will determine what kind of commercial messages Twitter will have rights to monetize via ads. Twitter wants to "take a far reaching license to the content, with two exceptions (endorsement, content profit), and no opt-out." Twitter also talked about making its API license "more throttled than ToS."
The agenda topics for a Twitter management meeting on April 16, 2009 reads like a who's who of Hollywood and Silicon Valley: Diddy, Oprah, Marissa Mayer, Microsoft, 4Chan.
"Diddy values his contribution higher than we do," read the meeting minutes. In an earlier meeting on April 2, other potential advisors discussed included Shaq and Al Gore (presumably both would receive advisor shares as well). If Diddy was a distraction, Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a "huge distraction" who kept asking for stats on Twitter's growth. Twitter management decided to give her "a constrained version of growth." Finally, Microsoft wanted to talk about a deep infrastructure deal ("we don't want to talk about this right now") and a "secret project with the x-box."
Twitter TV show was in the works, and Twitter decided it needed to "kill the story that "twitter is coming out with a TV show." The message: there are "many users of Twitter - none are officially blessed."
It is clear from the notes that the company was still struggling to define itself: Some stabs at defining the company's mission included "Twitter is for discovering and sharing what is happening right now," and "Twitter makes you smarter, faster, more efficient and more powerful."
A lot of the meeting dealt with Twitter's acquisition angst and trying to decide "What do we want to be when we grow up?" The company has an "IPO Bias," yet realizes it will "always have to be open to Exits." The "only type of acquisition we are interested in are ones where we stay in charge." Twitter management felt that the "Facebook sell always seemed wrong," that it was "the wrong destiny for Twitter."
tw-strat-acquisition-angst-2 The Facebook Threat: The Facebook threat keeps coming back up. In one portion of the meeting devoted to discussing "How could Facebook kill us?"
tw-strat-fb-kill-us-2 Defensive Strategy: The company also considered how best to defend against Facebook. "Make sure people are happy" is at the top of the list, followed by "cult" and "get more and better developers." Doing a better job and getting "twitter everywhere" seems to be its best defense.
tw-strat-defense-against-facebook Real-Time Search: Twitter is clearly concerned about positioning itself against its two main rivals and potential acquirers. In contrast to finding out "what is happening right now" on Twitter, "Google is old news." Yet during the meeting, the company is clearly preoccupied with search: "Twitter the product is a vehicle for twitter search;" and "Twitter should tell me stuff without me searching for that."
tw-strat-what-is-twitter-2 Financials: The company talks about its financial model, which boils down to generating "$1 per user per year" and going from 25 million users at the end of 2009 to one billion in 2013, with a user being defined as a "unique individual having a conscious twitter experience in a given week."
verified commercial accounts, which is described as the "fastest way to make money without putting a whole organization behind it." Another benefit to targeting corporate and celebrity users: "Charging more to fewer users is a good model." But it is the next business models down the list which start to become interesting. These include Search/Content Ads (with heavy users of the search API being required to run ads), Sponsored Tweets, "Adsense Widgets" (presumably Twitter ads which can run on other sites like Google's AdSense, and in other apps) and payments.
tw-strat-revenue-plans-2 Getting To One Billion Users: The key to most of these business models is to keep attracting more users, and the company has some creative thoughts on how to acquire them. These include: "Free phones preloaded with twitter," "TV twitter," "Kindle," "Radio," "Dell, build it into," videogame consoles, Website widgets, IM networks, and PCs. They also realize the "cost would kill us if we had a billion users tomorrow."
tw-strat-feeds March 12, 2009 Meeting (Getting Back to Google): Moving forward to a regular management meeting on March 12, the subject of Google comes up again. Google's blog search team was scraping Twitter's site and getting only "60-70% of updates." They wanted Twitter to hurry up with its Hosebird API so that they could start indexing every Tweet. Already, Twitter made up "90% of the cont...
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