It has been one great year for Twitter with the service seeing huge growth, especially in the first half of the year. It rose from a microblogging service used by the hip, tech-savvy crowd to one used by millions of regular people, as well as the latest trend for celebrities and companies. Lately though, it looks like some of the shine may be fading and traffic numbers have stayed flat since summer. Despite this, cofounder Biz Stone is more confident than ever that the site will continue to grow and that 2010 will see more significant changes for the service, which it now dubs an “information network,” and Twitter will become an essential tool for keeping the world updated with the latest news and trends.
In a piece published by the British newspaper The Times and written by Stone, Twitter’s cofounder looks back at the past year and at what he sees as the company’s promising future. “For us, it has been a year during which we realised that no matter how sophisticated the algorithms get, no matter how many machines we add to the network, our work is not about the triumph of technology, it is about the triumph of humanity,” he writes.
Stone dwells a lot on the Iran elections during which Twitter really came to be known as an information source being used by people in Iran, as well as those outside … (read more)