Evan Williams, founder and chief executive of Twitter, opened the Online News Association conference in San Francisco on 2 October 2009, in a fireside chat before several hundred journalists, academics and developers. He reported strong growth in the UK, Brazil and Canada, and enough traffic in Japan that Japanese was then the only supported language besides English. The message volume out of Mumbai and Iran had surprised him, though he thought it should not have: when people write about what is around them, some of it is news.
Those “little bits of information”, as he put it, were complementary to journalism rather than a replacement for it. The company was working on relevancy, but he saw separating signal from noise as a job journalists were better placed to do, and named the Huffington Post as the outlet leading on curation. Twitter also wanted more trust and authenticity built in, its reputation systems being at a nascent stage.
The one announcement was a feature due within weeks that would let anyone assemble a list of accounts and publish it as a public timeline, exposed through APIs and widgets — editing a public feed, in his framing, much as an editor works over copy. On the company itself he was candid: eighty employees, a stretched team, and product improvement ahead of building a business around it. Twitter was something they had stumbled into; the method was to plant seeds in fertile ground and let users teach the company what the service should be, though “we won’t strictly adhere to majority rule”.