And yet, he was in good sprits, focusing instead on good things that were happening in his life — his new startup, Avocado (an intimacy application much like Pair and Couple) finally has a new office and is growing like a weed on the Android platform. He has ample money from investors such as General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners. So perhaps that is why he doesn’t want to dwell on the past.

Wetherell, who spent four years on the product left Google and later joined Twitter, co-started Thing Labs and worked on Brizzly before arriving at his new idea.

When I asked the Beaverton, Oregon, native about his emotional state, he quietly pointed out that he has had years to prepare for today.

As we dug into steaming plates of vegetarian (and super spicy) Chinese food at Henry’s Hunan, a block away from his and my office, Wetherell joked that he had lost his innocence about the business world a long time ago and had developed a thick skin. “I have seen a lot worse decisions than this,” he quipped, in between sips of piping hot soup.

A slow lingering death

“When they replaced sharing with +1 on Google Reader, it was clear that this day was going to come,” he said. Wetherell, 43, is amazed that Reader has lasted this long. Even before the project saw the light of the day, Google executives were unsure about the service and it was through sheer perseverance that it squeaked out into the market. At one point, the management team threatened to cancel the project even before it saw the light of the day, if there was a delay.

“We had a sign that said, ‘days since cancellation‘ and it was there from the very beginning,” added a very sanguine Wetherell. My translation: Google never really believed in the project. Google Reader started in 2005 at what was really the golden age of RSS, blogging systems and a new content ecosystem. The big kahuna at that time was Bloglines (acquired by Ask.com) and Google Reader was an upstart.

And it entered the market with big ideas, a clear, clean slate and captured the imagination of early adopters despite some glitches. The Google Reader team, which included Chris (who was the Senior Software Engineer), worked hard to keep pushing the product forward. Among the folks who worked on the project included backend guru Ben Darnell, Mihai Parparita and Jason Shellen.

Missed opportunities

I wonder, did the company (Google) and the ecosystem at large misread the tea leaves? Did the world at large see an RSS/reader market when in reality the actual market opportunity was in data and sentiment analysis? Wetherell agreed. “The reader market never went past the experimental phase and none was iterating on the business model,” he said. “Monetization abilities were never tried.”

“There was so much data we had and so much information about the affinity readers had with certain content that we always felt there was monetization opportunity,” he said. Dick Costolo (currently CEO of Twitter), who worked for Google at the time (having sold Google his company, Feedburner), came up with many monetization ideas but they fell on deaf ears. Costolo, of course is working hard to mine those affinity-and-context connections for Twitter, and is succeeding. What Costolo understood, Google and its mandarins totally missed, as noted in this November 2011 blog post by Chris who wrote:

Reader exhibits the best unpaid representation I’ve yet seen of a consumer’s relationship to a content producer. You pay for HBO? That’s a strong signal. Consuming free stuff? Reader’s model was a dream. Even better than Netflix. You get affinity (which has clear monetary value) for free, and a tracked pattern of behavior for the act of iterating over differently sourced items – and a mechanism for distributing that quickly to an ostensible audience which didn’t include social guilt or gameification – along with an extensible, scalable platform available via commonly used web technologies – all of which would be an amazing opportunity for the right product visionary. Reader is (was?) for information junkies; not just tech nerds. This market totally exists and is weirdly under-served (and is possibly affluent).

If there were things that went wrong, then there is a lot of positive things that came from Google Reader, Wetherell said. He believed that one of the main reasons why Google Reader could exist was because companies and entities with completely conflicting agendas came together to support RSS and other standards. Google, MoveableType, Blogger, WordPress, Flickr and several other web apps believed in creating RSS feeds for easy consumption. “In the end it helped the average users,” said Wetherell.

But all that is behind us and we might not see similar altruism again, Wetherell theorized. I agree with him. If in the early 2000s, Web 2.0 companies were building platforms that wanted to work with each other, today we have platforms that are closed.

We live in the world of silos now. Twitter and Instagram have broken up. Facebook is the Soviet Union of the modern web. The new systems don’t offer RSS or feeds. “There is no common language of sharing,” he bemoaned. And rightfully so! And unless we have web giants speaking the same language of sharing, there seems to be no future of aggregation.

Built at Google Scale

Marco Arment said it is good that Google Reader is shutting down, because “we’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.” It won’t be easy or trivial. As we finished up our dinner, Wetherell said that it took a lot to make Google Reader work.

For instance, it was Google Crawler that gave the system ability to make lightning-fast connections and bring up recommendations. It is one of the main reasons it cannot be open sourced. The systems are too intertwined with Google’s search and other infrastructure to be sold as well.

In addition, Google had a separate recommendations team fine-tuning Google Reader, and those people don’t come in cheap. And let’s not forget that it was Google’s infrastructure that allowed millions of accounts to be hosted and many billions of items — photos, videos, text objects — to be saved for people to consume them at their leisure.

It wasn’t — and it still isn’t — a cheap exercise, said Wetherell, rationalizing why he somewhat understands Google’s predicament. ”This is and will always be a Google-level problem, especially if you are building a service for more than a few people,” he said.

End of the Reader Era

So if a company like Google, which has the infrastructure and a monetization machine in place to profit from the reader market, is throwing in the towel, what hope do others have? Most importantly, what if readers are not even necessary? Dave Winer wrote:

I didn’t think the mailbox approach to news was right. Who cares how many unread items there are. I like the river of news approach and I have a very fine set of rivers that keep me well supplied with news and podcasts.

After a roller coaster of emotions — shock, disappointment and anger — had run their gut wrenching course, I asked myself the question: has the world changed so much that we don’t really need something like Google Reader? Is it time to think about something else, something brand new? Something that is more in sync with a world where information flows through the social webs and is consumed on devices in our pockets?

Something like Prismatic, perhaps? Something that automagically surfaces what we want or what we should want to read? I know it is a painful thought to think at this moment, but technology brings change — and change we must. Chris puts it well when he wrote:

Reader will be an interesting footnote in tech history.

That’s neat and that’s enough for me; wasn’t it fun that we were able to test if it worked?

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The company has been shaking up its leadership recently and making new appointments, having made Ali Rowghani the new chief operating officer and named Mike Gupta to chief financial officer position back in December.

Twitter has not yet responded with a comment on Messinger’s new role.

Messinger was previously Twitter’s VP for application development, and before that he was vice president for development at Oracle. Twitter has had a decent run lately on the infrastructure side with its uptime, but is rolling out a number of new product features as it gears up for stronger monetization efforts and a potential upcoming IPO

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Congratulations to @rowghani on his new role as COO and to @mgupta on his new role as CFO.—
dick costolo (@dickc) December 20, 2012

Rowghani was previously the chief financial officer at Twitter, and he will now assume the role that Dick Costolo held before becoming CEO in 2010. Before joining Twitter, Rowghani was CFO at Pixar. Gupta was most recently chief financial officer at Zynga before coming to Twitter  in November.

The company has seen several changes and hires in key roles in the last year as the company grew and moved to new offices. The New York Times recently reported that Twitter is expected to make $1 billion in revenue next year, and the executive changes come as Twitter moves to monetize and solidify its position in the Valley.

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The header photos aren’t visible in the main Twitter feed, and might not seem like a consequential part of a user’s Twitter experience, except they turn a user’s profile page into more of a landing page for that person’s Twitter presence, and emphasize photos in the ongoing “photo war” between Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, all of whom are competing to keep users engaged and uploading images to the respective sites.

A Twitter blog post explains how to add header photos, and points out examples of media personalities and celebrities who’ve integrated the header photo into their profiles, greater evidence of Twitter’s play to become more of a media company.

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In the interview, Costolo also talked about the evolution of founder Jack Dorsey’s role at the company, although he didn’t discuss reports published by the New York Times and others that said Twitter’s creator had to reduce his day-to-day role overseeing product design because people found him difficult and indecisive. And he remained circumspect about when (or if) the company plans to go public, as he has been in other interviews, saying only that it’s “not on our radar right now.” But Costolo also talked about what he sees as the most compelling feature of Twitter — namely, its ability to turn the news inside out and show us what others like ourselves are thinking about a global news event:

“We used to have a filtered, one-way view of events in the world from the media — whether it was a sporting event like the Olympics or an event like the presidential debates last week. America’s perspective of it, or the world’s perspective of that event, would be seen through the lens of the way that the media described it to them… now with Twitter, people want to know what everyone else thinks and we’re getting this inside-out, multi-perspective view of what’s going on right now as it happens from everybody else that’s watching the same thing we’re watching.”

What’s interesting about Costolo’s description of Twitter’s key feature are the examples that he chooses to focus on: the Olympics and the presidential debate. Both were huge traffic drivers for both Twitter and the broadcast networks who aired them — according to the Twitter blog, there were more than 10 million tweets sent during the two hours that the presidential debate was on, and the Olympics sparked about 150 million tweets, according to the company. Although some have argued that Twitter as a “second screen” is a distraction during such events, it’s obvious that plenty of people disagree.

Twitter is complementary to media, Costolo says

But the Olympics were more than just an event; they were also the subject of a carefully choreographed partnership between the official broadcaster and Twitter. There was a custom news hub curated by Twitter staff (geo-gated, of course, due to NBC’s licensing restrictions) and in the wake of the Games, the company’s head of media partnerships boasted to the New York Times about how much the Twitter partnership had increased viewership for NBC’s broadcast, saying “What we saw is that it was an amazing daytime-teaser trailer, driving people into prime time.”

That partnership also caused some controversy after a Twitter staffer alerted NBC to the fact that a British journalist had posted a senior executive’s email address without his permission, which is against Twitter’s privacy rules. The journalist’s account was quickly suspended, which left Twitter with a bit of a black eye from a public-relations perspective, since its motto has always been “let the tweets flow” and both Costolo and general counsel Alex Macgillivray have talked about how Twitter is the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” Some said Twitter had lost its users’ trust.

What seems clear from Costolo’s discussion on Marketplace is that this kind of corporate partnership with existing media outlets, and likely television networks specifically, is where the company’s future lies — for better or worse. As he described it:

“I view it as very, very complementary to the news outlets. In fact, one of the things we saw during the Olympics is that Twitter actually… drove tune-in to the Olympics. [and] what was happening was people would see on Twitter something like, wow, the U.S. women’s 4-by-100 meter relay team just broke the world record — and then they would make sure they tuned in that night to watch it, when they might not otherwise even know that women’s track and field was going to be on that night. So I think it is incredibly complementary to news and media in a way that maybe other technologies haven’t been in the past.”

Costolo also talked in the interview about how the company fights on behalf of its users when they are involved in court cases like the one involving Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris, in which the New York district attorney forced Twitter to provide personal information about Harris, including content that he had posted on Twitter. But when it comes to the kind of media model that the company seems to be pinning its hopes on, it sounds like being the “second screen” for public events broadcast by existing media players is the future. Whether that will bring Twitter fame and fortune remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Giuseppe Bognanni

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“Twitter is a city company,” he said Thursday at OpenCoSF, a conference meant to integrate city tech companies with the local community. “The company needs to be in the city. It feels gritty to be in the city. It was born in the city and felt important for us to stay in the city.”

Twitter’s move to the still developing mid-Market neighborhood was considered a major win for San Francisco and Mayor Ed Lee, who pushed hard to keep the company from moving south, but dropping the high-tech company in the middle of a long-rundown area has created questions about whether the company will integrate at all into the neighborhood or remained a walled fortress, and whether its presence will make the area unaffordable for previous residents.

Costolo said when co-founder Evan Williams originally mentioned the company’s current building as an option, the realtor didn’t think they’d want to make the move.

“The realtor said, ‘You don’t want to look at that, that’s in a neighborhood… You wouldn’t want to be over there.’”

But Costolo said they were intrigued by the amount of space available in the building, and the degree to which it would let the company expand.

“The building has beautiful bones,” he said. “There are just amazing Art Deco pieces inside of it. And we have the critical mass that we we thought we could move into this space.”

The New York Times published a profile of Costolo this past weekend, mentioning that the CEO has been known to leave work to have dinner with his kids and return back to work in the late evening and encourages co-workers to do the same. Costolo noted on Thursday that positioning the offices in the city created a more central location for work, making it easier for employees to balance work and personal life with more limited commutes.

“I think it affords people a more flexible way to continue to be productive both in their time in the office and out of the office,” he said.

An audience member immediately asked Costolo whether his employees would engage with the neighborhood, or whether they’d remain in Twitter’s offices for lunch — the internal food options aren’t too shabby. Costolo said it’s a tough question, because he wants his employees to get out in the neighborhood, and doesn’t want Twitter’s offices to be a “castle,” but there’s a practical element to having people stay focused near their desks during the work day. He said it’s something the company will continue to work on, with other tech companies watching Twitter’s evolution closely.

“There’s no doubt about it, there’s a huge migration of tech companies to San Francisco,” famed investor Ron Conway said.

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Dorsey returned to the company in March 2011 to help guide product development, arriving with Costolo after being forced out by co-founder Evan Williams back in 2008. Dorsey signaled his delight to return to Twitter, but an extensive profile of Costolo published in The New York Times this weekend reported that Dorsey has now scaled back that role, with fellow employees complaining he was difficult to work with.

Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions.

Dorsey confirmed that his role became more limited in January of this year and that he’s returned his attention to Square, although he made no mention of disagreements with co-workers:

In Spring of 2011, Dick asked me to take an operational role overseeing product, design, and brand. Our shared goal was to get those organizations back under him as soon as possible, simply because it was the right thing to do for the company. We moved all of my reports back under him in January of this year after leadership was firmly in place. This allowed me to focus on refining our brand and logo, to work more with Dick and the leadership team on our direction forward, and ultimately return the majority of my time to Square, where I’m CEO.

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Although he was brought back into the company (with much fanfare) to help guide the product’s evolution, Dorsey is apparently not really involved with day-to-day decisions any more. So who is Twitter’s product visionary now, and what does that mean for the future of the service? According to Bilton, the co-founder has stepped back from having more of a day-to-day role within the company, in part because other employees said he was difficult to deal with and found his product direction confusing. As the NYT writer puts it:

“Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions.”

Who is Twitter’s chief visionary now?

As Bilton describes in his piece, Dorsey — who famously drafted the original idea for Twitter on a notepad in 2006 — left the company under less-than-auspicious circumstances in 2008, after Evan Williams took control and forced him out as chief executive, something Dorsey later said was “like a punch in the stomach.” But not long after Costolo took over as CEO of Twitter in 2010 (and Williams left to start a new startup incubator called Obvious), the company asked Dorsey to come back as executive chairman and help revitalize the product. At the time, Dorsey said on Twitter that he was “thrilled to get back to work at Twitter leading product.”

Over the next year, Twitter redesigned its mobile app and also its website, launching new features that allowed content to be embedded inside a tweet — something the company has since extended with what it calls “Twitter cards,” which allow videos and excerpts of other types of content to appear inside a frame. Some sources close to the company say this effort was the evolution of something called “annotations,” which Twitter promised it would roll out in 2010 but never implemented. Twitter cards are also seen by many as the key to the company’s future revenue plans.

Bilton doesn’t say when Dorsey’s role at the company was scaled back, although reports earlier this year from Business Insider and All Things Digital suggested he was no longer as involved as he had been, in part because his other company — the mobile-payment company Square — had started taking off (it has since become a major player with an estimated market value of $3 billion). And while the NYT piece says Costolo “looks to Dorsey for ideas,” and director of consumer product Michael Sippey also works with him to make sure the product is “Twittery,” it’s not clear exactly what Dorsey has been involved with when it comes to recent features.

What does Twitter want to be when it grows up?

So Twitter now has product leads in charge of consumer features, advertising and international, but it doesn’t have anyone driving the broader vision related to the service except for Costolo — who doesn’t have a product background — and Dorsey in what appears to be a part-time role. Some see that as a bad thing for a startup that is trying to balance the conflicting needs of users and advertisers, something that sources close to Twitter say is causing dissent even within the company. As angel investor Chris Dixon put it when Dorsey returned to the company last year:

“The history of tech companies shows again and again that having a great product-focused founder at the helm has always been the best thing for the company and for its customers/users.”

Twitter has been the target of a lot of criticism from developers and power users recently, for clamping down on the way external apps and services (such as Tumblr and Instagram) use the company’s API, and forcing them to display tweets in certain ways. The company and its supporters maintain that this is not meant as a crackdown on the Twitter ecosystem, but instead is a desire to implement a “consistent user experience” — the same reason the official iPad app was recently replaced, even though some users complained that features they liked were no longer supported.

Users and designers say Twitter’s crackdown on external apps would be a lot easier to tolerate or even support if the company’s own products were more appealing to use. So are the shortcomings in the service and its offerings a result of Dorsey’s vision, or the result of a lack of vision because he has stepped back from a day-to-day role with the company? Either way, those vision problems could cause Twitter even more growing pains in the future as it tries to go mainstream.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jack Dorsey and Pinar Ozger

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According to the Poynter.org blog, Costolo said:

We have known for a long time that when events happen in the real world, the shared experience is on Twitter and we want to create an ability to curate events.

In theory this tool could be used to add more context and allow the aggregated tweets to paint a better picture of what’s really going on, focusing on the narrative rather than the noise. Think Storify or Tweetmeme only without leaving Twitter itself. (The ONA conversation is here.)

Twitter and journalists: a love-hate affair

Costolo also promised that people will be able to download their full tweet stream by year’s end, a claim that took blogging pioneer Dave Winer by surprise since Twitter has started to exercise more control over the content that runs on its service. Winer wrote:

I was amazed by this. And I don’t believe it will ever happen, or if it does it will be in GIF format or PDF, some format that makes it virtually impossible to move the data somewhere else. It would be completely inconsistent for Twitter to offer freedom to its users when it’s paying such a high price in goodwill to take away that freedom.

As Winer’s words make clear, the relationship between journalists (and other users) that rely on Twitter and Twitter itself is getting complicated.  Some of Twitter’s actions raise questions about who owns the tweetstream, the people who create and post it or Twitter itself. And, the company ‘s new API, which initially affects third-party developers could end up impacting newspapers and blogs that use it to build Twitter-based features or services. As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram put it:

[Twitter] moves to lock down its network and control more of the content have raised some hackles in the journalism community, however, even as Twitter expands on its partnerships with select media entities such as NBC and MTV — and those stress points are only going to increase as the company’s ambitions and desire for revenue continue to grow.

Twitter wants Brady

Twitter has also been a huge platform for celebrities or would-be celebrities to build their brand and connect with fans. (As an example, Lady Gaga has more than 29 million followers.

On a lighter note at the conference, Costolo was asked what celebrity he would most like to see on Twitter. He didn’t hesitate: It’s Tom Brady. It turns out that the New England Patriots quarterback and Costolo are both University of Michigan alums. (For what it’s worth, Brady’s supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen has been tweeting for some time.)

Tom Brady photo courtey of Keith Allison

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The new design is reminiscent of Facebook’s Timeline, and provides users with a more personal and visual feel. The most conspicuous feature is a dominant photo in the upper right that takes up some of the screen real estate once held by tweets.

Costolo said the new design will be appearing right away but as the site for now looks the same (on my Twitter page anyways), here is a closer look at the image above, taken from the Today Show:

Both the new look and the way it was announced confirm Twitter’s ambitions as a major media player. The company has already partnered with NBC on top-shelf events like the Olympics and signed up major advertisers like NASCAR. Prior to Costolo’s appearance, this morning’s Today Show was peppered with Twitter-related hype about Justin Bieber and how Ryan Seacrest used the medium to announce American Idol judges.

To get a deeper understanding of what Twitter is and where it is going, see my colleague Mathew Ingram’s piece: “Twitter as media“

Twitter also announced a new iPad design. The company’s official blog said Twitter has ”rebuilt the app from the ground up to make it fast, beautiful and easy to use.”

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