Hey everyone… we decided to bring a little bit of SXSW day 4 right to you. We just sat down to a packed house for the Day 4 keynote conversation with Evan Williams – cofounder of Twitter. I’ll be doing my best to keep up with some of the most important highlights from the conversation. Forgive the brevity of the updates – we’ll be able to go into more detail later. Thanks for following along. Cheers!
One note: we don’t have auto-refresh on Media Mosaic, so either set your browsers to refresh automatically or do it manually to follow along in realtime.
Real-time Notes:
- About to get started here… doors are closed as we’re at full capacity. And this is a HUGE room…
- SXSW founder starting off by giving props to Twitter for allowing this conference to explode in the last 4 years.
- Ev Williams is now out on stage to a big round of applause. He is starting out right away with the new content platform… this is big news folks. It’s called @anywhere… now rolling a video of how it works…
- It’s content based… features immediate follow functionality and look much like Google contextual text ads. Some sites already signed on… Amazon, Digg, Youtube, (list goes on – all huge names)… First thought – this expands Twitter’s reach and drives the functionality and tool into the real mainstream.
- On sites like NYTimes.com (and all sites using this new feature) you can tweet directly from the column/article. Thought: this will be huge for content-driven sites and expands the immediacy of thought distribution. “It’s a platform that lets sites juice up their own platforms.”
- They’re labeling this “@platform” - not necessarily a direct ad platform.
- The nature of this platform makes Twitter faster, easier, and more understandable in my opinion. I also feel this could go a long way for publishers and news portals who are losing audience. It’s now easier to share relevant content directly on those sites.
- Williams is now praising his Twitter staff and giving kudos to users who have not only helped shape this tool, but Twitter as a whole. It’s very true… and give Twitter praise for recognizing needs and reshaping functionality based on what users want.
- Ev now talking about how openness is the key to Twitter as well as the basis to which his company runs. They believe in the the concept of sharing information. Openness does not necessarily mean transparency… he says “a window is transparent, but a door is open.”
- “Assume there are more smart people outside the company than inside it.” - Williams preaches this to his employees. I love that concept.
- Through discussion and debate about only making this available to the big bidders, Twitter is apparently going to eventually begin to make this available to everyone on the web… down to the small mom and pop sites.
- “Openness can be used against you.” – Williams… so they still have to manage. (blocking users, spam, cease-and-desist orders, etc.). Though: that’s music to the ears of advertisers who are afraid of the nature of this type of an open ecosystem.
- Williams just read a pretty powerful email from a citizen in Chile praising and thanking Twitter for being the only tool they could use to communicate with the outside world during a time of disaster. SMS capabilities in this for people who couldn’t get access to the internet.
Alright folks… that’s the big news. I think this is going to be a pretty powerful tool and extend the use of Twitter by individuals, brands, and advertisers. And, oh yeah, it’s going to make Twitter a lot of dough through these partnerships. The session is wrapping up with some basic conversations… we’ll fill you in on all of that later. If you have questions, drop us a line. Thanks for following along!
One more update: for more information on @anywhere directly from the mouth of Twitter, check out http://blog.twitter.com/2010/03/anywhere.html
