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Tweeting, texting render avid users 'present yet absent'

Fran Stover sent out an electronic "It's a boy!" birth announcement, complete with picture, when she upgraded to a burgundy BlackJack II from Samsung in March. She nicknamed "him" Jack. When she knew she wouldn't have access to him for a spell, she worried about hurting his feelings and wondered if she should hire a babysitter. Lucy Hackman flew to Bermuda last month for a wedding. On her way to the hotel, she fixed her attention not on the miles of ocean outside her taxi window but on the tiny window of her BlackBerry.

GOING DIGITAL-FREE: Five readers take the challenge Megan Renz, who typically sends around 700 texts a day, including rapid-fire sessions when she's at the park with her 4-year-old son, Landon, curbed her online habit slightly during a Hawaiian vacation in May, when she jumped on her computer for only four hours a day. For fun.

Restaurant meals, family outings and holiday gatherings — not to mention movie dates, birthday parties and even baby showers — used to be about enjoying the moment of, say, a shared joke, a knowing glance or a sip of cold beer over a sunset. Now, thanks to technology, those moments are multi-tasked to the minute, to the point where even the digitally addicted admit they're so burrowed into their virtual lives they sometimes miss out on the real thing.

Cellphone cameras have replaced cigarette lighters as the concert torch of choice. Sure, scads of sequined gloves were dug out of closets, but Michael Jackson's memorial was remarkable more as a mass Facebook status update: 800,000 were posted during the two-hour tribute. For the July 15 premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, actually attending the event was only half the goal, it seemed, as Hogwarts-dressed teens texted "wish you were here"-style postcards to those who weren't. And remember when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was caught checking his BlackBerry during one of Malia's soccer games last summer — and was roundly reprimanded by Michelle, with a hand slap, for doing so?

It makes one wonder: Who will be around to watch the grass grow?"We're so entrenched in what we're doing" — in the palm of our hand or in the canal of our ear — "that we're not paying attention to the outside world," says Ray Soto, 30, who has run into walls because his head is bowed into his iPhone. Technology's tether is "terrible," says Renz, 24, of Hilton, N.Y. "I have a life and job and family, and I'm still on the thing," a Pantech Slate, her 10th or so smartphone since 2006.

Digital dangers

We're all increasingly on them: A report released last year from M:Metrics, a mobile-media research firm, found that Americans browsed the Web an average of 4.6 hours a month from their smartphones, an 89% increase from 2007. A May study from consulting firm Gravitytank found that app-enabled phone owners spend an average of two hours a day on their devices, with nearly 40% of that time dedicated to app use. By 2013, smartphones will have doubled their share of the handset market, accounting for 20% of all cellphones, according to market research company In-Stat.

Of course, the safety risks linked to gadgets-on-the-go are well-documented: Last week, the Senate introduced legislation that aims to extend the ban on texting while driving. Even thumbing while on foot has its hazards: Last month, a texting teen tumbled down an uncovered manhole in Staten Island, N.Y. (She escaped serious injury.)

But it's the cultural consequences of shunning the corporeal moment in favor of the virtual one that are murkier. Dan Rasmus, director of business insights at Microsoft and co-author of Listening to the Future: Why It's Everybody's Business, calls one effect digital autism: When you're engrossed in the digital world, you're more disconnected from the social and physical world. In particular, it's the so-called virtuals, those born after 1999, who need watching. "They have parents and elder siblings behaving in a different way, so what are they learning about what's the right way to behave?"

Technology results in what psychologist Kenneth Gergen, a senior research professor at Swarthmore College, calls "absent presence": others are present, via a virtual connective thread, even though they're physically absent. It works the other way, too: You're at dinner, for example, and your partner disappears from the present moment by thumbing away under the tablecloth.

Frequent diner Sam Firer, whose public relations company represents two dozen restaurants in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, instructs his staff to stow their smartphones when they're at client restaurants, in part to set a good example for patrons: "I'd like my clients to know that we're not obnoxious, unlike many other diners these days."

That "green or blue glow" of a table-parked smartphone is emerging as the "subversive factor" in dining, says Frank Klein, a restaurant owner and consultant based in San Francisco and Boston. In the early part of the decade, traditional phone booths begat restaurant cellphone booths. "Now, maybe it's time to have a Twitter or text booth." When someone's eyes drift to an iPhone midsentence — when they are present but absent — Firer is known to swivel his chair so his back faces the speaker. "They're doing the same thing, in essence."

Losing our 'creatureliness'

What worries Gergen is when "the environment itself, that living world upon which our creatureliness is based, is separated from us," distanced through a glowing screen. Without sensual engagement with their surroundings, people are becoming "post-human," Gergen says, "more a part of their machine world than their biological world." Some companies are acknowledging this latest incarnation of the man-vs.-machine struggle with a wink. Consider that Corona beer's-eye-view-of-paradise ad, in which someone skips stones, and then his cellphone, into a lagoon after the phone starts buzzing. Or that Verizon/ESPN MVP ad in which a woman being feted at a baby shower watches college hoops highlights on her cell instead of oohing and aahing over her little-girl gifts.

Losing time to decompress

If we're interrupting our silver screen time with LED screen time, there's a social significance. In the past, waiting for a movie to start or an elevator to descend meant "you had a bit of forced downtime," says Patricia Wallace, head of online programs at Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth and the author of The Psychology of the Internet. "It let you gather your wits or stare at the (floor) numbers. You were relieving your cognitive load" — you were engaging in forced relaxation. "Now you can suck up all those little slots of time and pour something into them, whether it's work or social, because you have a gadget."

Digital devotees see the shift. "I do think there's something to say about how we're not living in the moment and stopping to smell the roses," says New Yorker Karen Robinovitz, co-founder and creator of the new beauty brand Purple Lab. "But I think the roses are different now: They're virtual Facebook gifts," icons you send your Facebook friends as tokens of appreciation.

Robinovitz has started mashing together her online and in-person lives every month through tweet-ups, during which she and 10 to 15 similarly style-obsessed women gather to Twitter and, yes, talk between sips of lychee martinis. Robinovitz is the kind of person who, while heading to Sunday brunch with her husband, will tweet that very fact, which doesn't exactly thrill her better half. "He's like, 'C'mon, I want to spend time with you, not you on Twitter.'

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So a couple of weeks ago, she put down her BlackBerry and, with her husband, strolled along the High Line, a new park in Manhattan built atop an old elevated train track. For an hour, she wasn't distracted by anything but the wildflower dιcor and rooftop views. "There was something incredibly refreshing about it." Somebody recently asked Robinovitz what achievement she was most proud of. She may have launched a lip gloss line in May, "and yet I was most proud of walking on the High Line and not Twittering."

Submitted by: http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812 http://www.protrackerplus.com/2587/leadsonpn.html

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of. In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it. The Open Conversation

Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)

But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.

At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.

When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.

Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.

The Super-Fresh Web

The basic mechanics of Twitter are remarkably simple. Users publish tweets — those 140-character messages — from a computer or mobile device. (The character limit allows tweets to be created and circulated via the SMS platform used by most mobile phones.) As a social network, Twitter revolves around the principle of followers. When you choose to follow another Twitter user, that user's tweets appear in reverse chronological order on your main Twitter page. If you follow 20 people, you'll see a mix of tweets scrolling down the page: breakfast-cereal updates, interesting new links, music recommendations, even musings on the future of education. Some celebrity Twitterers — most famously Ashton Kutcher — have crossed the million-follower mark, effectively giving them a broadcast-size audience.

The average Twitter profile seems to be somewhere in the dozens: a collage of friends, colleagues and a handful of celebrities. The mix creates a media experience quite unlike anything that has come before it, strangely intimate and at the same time celebrity-obsessed. You glance at your Twitter feed over that first cup of coffee, and in a few seconds you find out that your nephew got into med school and Shaquille O'Neal just finished a cardio workout in Phoenix. (See excerpts from the world's most popular Twitterers.)

In the past month, Twitter has added a search box that gives you a real-time view onto the chatter of just about any topic imaginable. You can see conversations people are having about a presidential debate or the American Idol finale or Tiger Woods — or a conference in New York City on education reform. For as long as we've had the Internet in our homes, critics have bemoaned the demise of shared national experiences, like moon landings and "Who Shot J.R." cliff hangers — the folkloric American living room, all of us signing off in unison with Walter Cronkite, shattered into a million isolation booths.

But watch a live mass-media event with Twitter open on your laptop and you'll see that the futurists had it wrong. We still have national events, but now when we have them, we're actually having a genuine, public conversation with a group that extends far beyond our nuclear family and our next-door neighbors. Some of that conversation is juvenile, of course, just as it was in our living room when we heckled Richard Nixon's Checkers speech. But some of it is moving, witty, observant, subversive.

Skeptics might wonder just how much subversion and wit is conveyable via 140-character updates. But in recent months Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from "passed links" at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it's just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.

Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google's near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google's system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google's search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That's a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it's not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the "super fresh" Web. Even in its toddlerhood, Twitter is a more efficient supplier of the super-fresh Web than Google. If you're looking for interesting articles or sites devoted to Kobe Bryant, you search Google. If you're looking for interesting comments from your extended social network about the three-pointer Kobe just made 30 seconds ago, you go to Twitter.

From Toasters to Microwaves

Because Twitter's co-founders — Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey — are such a central-casting vision of start-up savvy (they're quotable and charming and have the extra glamour of using a loft in San Francisco's SoMa district as a headquarters instead of a bland office park in Silicon Valley) much of the media interest in Twitter has focused on the company. Will Ev and Biz sell to Google early or play long ball? (They have already turned down a reported $500 million from Facebook.) It's an interesting question but not exactly a new plotline. Focusing on it makes you lose sight of the much more significant point about the Twitter platform: the fact that many of its core features and applications have been developed by people who are not on the Twitter payroll.

This is not just a matter of people finding a new use for a tool designed to do something else. In Twitter's case, the users have been redesigning the tool itself. The convention of grouping a topic or event by the "hashtag" — #hackedu or #inauguration — was spontaneously invented by the Twitter user base (as was the convention of replying to another user with the @ symbol). The ability to search a live stream of tweets was developed by another start-up altogether, Summize, which Twitter purchased last year. (Full disclosure: I am an adviser to one of the minority investors in Summize.)

Thanks to these innovations, following a live feed of tweets about an event — political debates or Lost episodes — has become a central part of the Twitter experience. But just 12 months ago, that mode of interaction would have been technically impossible using Twitter. It's like inventing a toaster oven and then looking around a year later and seeing that your customers have of their own accord figured out a way to turn it into a microwave. (See the 50 best inventions of 2008.)

One of the most telling facts about the Twitter platform is that the vast majority of its users interact with the service via software created by third parties. There are dozens of iPhone and BlackBerry applications — all created by enterprising amateur coders or small start-ups — that let you manage Twitter feeds. There are services that help you upload photos and link to them from your tweets, and programs that map other Twitizens who are near you geographically. Ironically, the tools you're offered if you visit Twitter.com have changed very little in the past two years. But there's an entire Home Depot of Twitter tools available everywhere else.

As the tools have multiplied, we're discovering extraordinary new things to do with them. Last month an anticommunist uprising in Moldova was organized via Twitter. Twitter has become so widely used among political activists in China that the government recently blocked access to it, in an attempt to censor discussion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. A service called SickCity scans the Twitter feeds from multiple urban areas, tracking references to flu and fever. Celebrity Twitterers like Kutcher have directed their vast followings toward charitable causes (in Kutcher's case, the Malaria No More organization).

Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it's entirely possible that three or four years from now, we'll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform — the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching — will persevere regardless of Twitter's fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade. In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years:

News and opinion. Increasingly, the stories that come across our radar — news about a plane crash, a feisty Op-Ed, a gossip item — will arrive via the passed links of the people we follow. Instead of being built by some kind of artificially intelligent software algorithm, a customized newspaper will be compiled from all the articles being read that morning by your social network. This will lead to more news diversity and polarization at the same time: your networked front page will be more eclectic than any traditional-newspaper front page, but political partisans looking to enhance their own private echo chamber will be able to tune out opposing viewpoints more easily.

Searching. As the archive of links shared by Twitter users grows, the value of searching for information via your extended social network will start to rival Google's approach to the search. If you're looking for information on Benjamin Franklin, an essay shared by one of your favorite historians might well be more valuable than the top result on Google; if you're looking for advice on sibling rivalry, an article recommended by a friend of a friend might well be the best place to start.

Advertising. Today the language of advertising is dominated by the notion of impressions: how many times an advertiser can get its brand in front of a potential customer's eyeballs, whether on a billboard, a Web page or a NASCAR hood. But impressions are fleeting things, especially compared with the enduring relationships of followers. Successful businesses will have millions of Twitter followers (and will pay good money to attract them), and a whole new language of tweet-based customer interaction will evolve to keep those followers engaged: early access to new products or deals, live customer service, customer involvement in brainstorming for new products.

Not all these developments will be entirely positive. Most of us have learned firsthand how addictive the micro-events of our personal e-mail inbox can be. But with the ambient awareness of status updates from Twitter and Facebook, an entire new empire of distraction has opened up. It used to be that you compulsively checked your BlackBerry to see if anything new had happened in your personal life or career: e-mail from the boss, a reply from last night's date. Now you're compulsively checking your BlackBerry for news from other people's lives. And because, on Twitter at least, some of those people happen to be celebrities, the Twitter platform is likely to expand that strangely delusional relationship that we have to fame. When Oprah tweets a question about getting ticks off her dog, as she did recently, anyone can send an @ reply to her, and in that exchange, there is the semblance of a normal, everyday conversation between equals. But of course, Oprah has more than a million followers, and that isolated query probably elicited thousands of responses. Who knows what small fraction of her @ replies she has time to read? But from the fan's perspective, it feels refreshingly intimate: "As I was explaining to Oprah last night, when she asked about dog ticks ..."

End-User Innovation

The rapid-fire innovation we're seeing around Twitter is not new, of course. Facebook, whose audience is still several times as large as Twitter's, went from being a way to scope out the most attractive college freshmen to the Social Operating System of the Internet, supporting a vast ecosystem of new applications created by major media companies, individual hackers, game creators, political groups and charities. The Apple iPhone's long-term competitive advantage may well prove to be the more than 15,000 new applications that have been developed for the device, expanding its functionality in countless ingenious ways.

The history of the Web followed a similar pattern. A platform originally designed to help scholars share academic documents, it now lets you watch television shows, play poker with strangers around the world, publish your own newspaper, rediscover your high school girlfriend — and, yes, tell the world what you had for breakfast. Twitter serves as the best poster child for this new model of social creativity in part because these innovations have flowered at such breathtaking speed and in part because the platform is so simple. It's as if Twitter's creators dared us to do something interesting by giving us a platform with such draconian restrictions. And sure enough, we accepted the dare with relish. Just 140 characters? I wonder if I could use that to start a political uprising. (See the 25 best blogs of 2009.)

The speed with which users have extended Twitter's platform points to a larger truth about modern innovation. When we talk about innovation and global competitiveness, we tend to fall back on the easy metric of patents and Ph.D.s. It turns out the U.S. share of both has been in steady decline since peaking in the early '70s. (In 1970, more than 50% of the world's graduate degrees in science and engineering were issued by U.S. universities.) Since the mid-'80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the '80s; now it's China and India.

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

How could the forecasts have been so wrong? The answer is that we've been tracking only part of the innovation story. If I go to grad school and invent a better mousetrap, I've created value, which I can protect with a patent and capitalize on by selling my invention to consumers. But if someone else figures out a way to use my mousetrap to replace his much more expensive washing machine, he's created value as well. We tend to put the emphasis on the first kind of value creation because there are a small number of inventors who earn giant paydays from their mousetraps and thus become celebrities. But there are hundreds of millions of consumers and small businesses that find value in these innovations by figuring out new ways to put them to use.

There are several varieties of this kind of innovation, and they go by different technical names. MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls one "end-user innovation," in which consumers actively modify a product to adapt it to their needs. In its short life, Twitter has been a hothouse of end-user innovation: the hashtag; searching; its 11,000 third-party applications; all those creative new uses of Twitter — some of them banal, some of them spam and some of them sublime. Think about the community invention of the @ reply. It took a service that was essentially a series of isolated microbroadcasts, each individual tweet an island, and turned Twitter into a truly conversational medium. All of these adoptions create new kinds of value in the wider economy, and none of them actually originated at Twitter HQ. You don't need patents or Ph.D.s to build on this kind of platform.

This is what I ultimately find most inspiring about the Twitter phenomenon. We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There's a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.

Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention of Air, and a co-founder of the local-news website outside.in

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812

SAN FRANCISCO — It's tea time at Twitter. While that may evoke images of courtly discussion over Earl Grey and finger sandwiches, it's quite another thing at Silicon Valley's new "it" company.

The idea is that any employee can step in front of the 43-person start-up and offer a no-holds-barred weekly critique on a Friday afternoon. Co-founders Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone often watch from the back, taking mental notes. Some employees recite poems; others make wacky slide presentations. The point is to express what the company means to them.

In another tradition, Alison Sudol, a musician with more than 500,000 followers on Twitter, this month spoke at headquarters, part of a monthly ritual in which artists and academics drop by to impart wisdom and entertain.

Both events underscore the bottom-up culture fostered by Twitter's unassuming co-founders, who have become reluctant media stars. "Tech founders get a little too much emphasis," CEO Evan Williams says. "So many people here contribute to our success."

Today, it seems everyone wants a piece of Twitter. There have been rumors of takeover overtures from Google, Facebook and Apple. Twitter, like Google, has become a verb (though the proper term is "tweet"). Twitter's co-founders have had a profound impact on how millions of people communicate. Yet, despite appearances on Oprah,The View and The Colbert Report, many refer to them as simply The Twitter Guys.

"They've created a new way for people to communicate publicly and instantaneously," says Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist who is on the company's six-member board and an investor.

The trio, all in their 30s, are college dropouts with a modest track record of success. Each helped start a company before Twitter. Dorsey invented the service out of his deep fascination with taxi dispatches and city grids. Williams began reading business books for fun as a teenager. Stone wrote two books on blogging, and is Twitter's de facto public relations department.

They're sitting on a potential gold mine. The 3-year-old firm raised $35 million in February alone — $55 million to date — and was recently valued at about $100 million.

To be sure, behind the feel-good vibes, meteoric growth and nationwide fixation, Twitter's founders face issues of user retention, outages and persistent questions about monetization. Such are the challenges for a highflying start-up trying to live up to its considerable hype in the worst economy in more than 70 years.

Yet, industry leaders such as Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh are convinced Twitter is up to the task. "All three (Twitter founders) have the belief that Twitter can change the world and the passion to make it actually happen," says Hsieh, a Web sales guru and fan of Twitter.

No slam-dunk

Millions of people use Twitter to trade short messages of 140 characters or less — think haiku — via the Web and cellphones. The free service is the fastest-growing major website in the U.S. It had 17 million registered users in the U.S. in April — up 3,000% from a year ago, according to market researcher ComScore.

Celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher (1.5 million followers) and athlete Shaquille O'Neal (950,000) have added to its popularity. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, an occasional adviser, believes the service will lead to new categories on the Web — "from real-time journalism to the next generation of customer service and call centers."

Before it gets there, however, Twitter must navigate several hurdles. Look no further than to Twitter Quitters, the cutesy nickname for users who quit after less than a month. Twitter's retention rate — people who return the next month — is about 40%, Nielsen Online says. Facebook and MySpace have rates of more than 60%.

There also is chronic second-guessing from users and tech analysts about Twitter's occasional outages and what it should do next — particularly, how it will make money in a sagging economy and whether it will be sold. (For the record, Williams says there is "no interest in selling.")

"Twitter must have the most armchair quarterbacks of any start-up in recent memory, except possibly Facebook," says Laura Fitton, a consultant and co-author of Twitter for Dummies.

Twitter experienced second-guessing full bore when it abruptly dropped a feature used by less than 3% of its users that removes some comments. "We screwed up," says Stone, who notes Twitter will soon have a solution. "There is so much going on here, we let it fall through the cracks." Adds Williams: "We did a poor job of communicating. When you evolve the service, you may upset people in the process. If you stand pat, you risk being stagnant."

The challenges don't end there. Twitter, like its social media peers, must produce revenue. "Eventually, companies like Twitter are going to be forced to choose between huge user numbers or a smaller, truly active network of people willing to pay a nominal fee," says Sayles Braga, CEO of YellowPin, a social-networking service.

Twitter's brain trust has heard it all before. "It took Google four to five years for revenue," says Dorsey, who was just in Iraq to help the government improve communications with citizens. "We will be patient, too." The usually chatty Stone and circumspect Williams are vague on how Twitter will evolve from hip technology to moneymaker. But Stone allows the company has plans for tools and services by year's end that will help businesses serve customers, and it may charge fees for such services.

"The idea of taking money to run traditional banner ads on Twitter.com has always been low on our list of interesting ways to generate revenue," Stone mused in a blog post last week. "However, facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling."

One new effort was announced Monday: an unscripted TV series based on the site that, according to the Associated Press, would "harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format."

The brain trust

The weight of all of the lofty expectations rests squarely on the slight shoulders of Williams, 37, who oversees daily operations. The Clarks, Neb., native succeeded Dorsey as chief executive in October. He has successfully navigated a start-up before. As co-founder of Blogger, one of the first applications for creating and managing blogs, he helped sell it to Google for an undisclosed amount in 2003.

Following Blogger's sale, Williams was not long for Google. He eventually hooked up with a friend, Noah Glass, to start Odeo, at the time a podcasting company. It was there that the Twitter concept was born.

"Ev is the total package," says Chris Sacca, one of Twitter's first investors and an adviser. "He reminds me so much of (Sacca's former Google bosses and co-founders) Sergey (Brin) and Larry (Page). They understand products and how they can fit in the future."

The son of a now-retired farmer, Williams showed a predilection for commerce as a teenager. He read business books on real estate, marketing and publishing. "I realized I could buy books and learn something that people spent years learning about," says Williams, who dropped out of the University of Nebraska just as the Web was becoming a phenomenon, in 1994.

While Williams bears the operational brunt of running Twitter, the tireless Stone is the marketing hub. On a typical day, he fields 100 media requests. "Ev is the technology builder, and Biz is the evocative and communicative one," says Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn, the popular business-networking service.

Their partnership was born of a close working relationship and friendship built after starting out as business competitors. In 2000, Stone co-founded Xanga.com, a website that hosts blogs and social-networking profiles. It "looked a lot like MySpace before MySpace," he says. Its rival was Williams' Blogger.

After Google bought Blogger, Williams asked Stone to join Google to help reboot Blogger with a new design and features. "I didn't really know Evan then," Stone says. "We were just familiar with each others' work. There was a mutual admiration."

By 2005, they left Google for Odeo. Stone's timing could have been better — he gave up his Google stock options because he wasn't there long enough to be vested — but Odeo was where Twitter was born. "Twitter is so many things: a messaging service; a customer-service tool to reach customers, as proven by Zappos, Comcast and others; real-time search; and microblogging," says Stone, 35.

The least visible co-founder, Dorsey, 32, is rarely around the office and already onto his Next Big Thing. But the St. Louis native is the mastermind behind the notepad sketch in 2000 that led to Twitter. "My whole philosophy is making tech more accessible and human," Dorsey says.

When an image of the sketch was uploaded on the Internet in 2006, Dorsey wrote: "I had an idea to make a more 'live' LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it. …We're calling it twttr." "Jack's original vision was staggering for its potential, as well as its simplicity," Sacca says.

These days, Dorsey is chairman of the company's board of directors and a strategic adviser, but is devoting his energies to a top-secret start-up. He won't say much about the new venture — only that it involves tech and communications, and that it may make its debut this summer. In many ways, the boyish-looking Dorsey best captures the spirit and look of Twitter. He bears a forearm-length tattoo that he says represents an F-sharp, an integral symbol from mathematics, and a human clavicle — the only bone, he says, with "free range of motion."

"I'm a very low-level programmer," Dorsey says, chuckling. "This idea of a short, inconsequential burst of activity (Twitter) turned out pretty well."

Submitted by James McLellan http://www.crazyfoxes-marketing-group.com/foxes-report/?jcmcl812