GigaOM » Ev Williams

Evan Williams’ Medium acquires long-form journalism site Matter

Laura Hazard Owen — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:00:09 +0000

Matter, the Kickstarter-backed, science and technology journalism startup cofounded by former GigaOM European correspondent Bobbie Johnson, has only been up and running for five months — but it’s already found a new home. Medium, the publishing platform founded by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams, has acquired Matter for an undisclosed sum, the companies plan to announce Wednesday.

Matter raised over $140,000 through Kickstarter, and Williams was one of its 2,566 backers. Matter, which publishes one story of at least 5,000 words every month and sells them for $0.99 apiece, will remain a standalone company following the acquisition. Johnson and his cofounder, Jim Giles, will work as part of Medium’s editorial team, which also includes former literary agent Kate Lee and former Wired.com editor-in-chief Evan Hansen.

In a blog post scheduled to be released Wednesday, Johnson and his Matter cofounder Jim Giles explained what will and won’t change:

“If you already know what we do, don’t expect big changes yet. Our service is an ongoing experiment, but we have no immediate plans to alter the team, the places we publish (our website and the Kindle store), or how much we charge for each article. More importantly, we have no plans — at any time — to stop crafting hard-hitting narratives about big ideas. One of the things that made it easy to join Medium was the knowledge that the company believes in great storytelling as much as we do, and is prepared to support what we do.

But we will be rolling out some changes in the coming months. We’ve already started using Medium to expand on the ideas we cover — see, for example, Amputees & Wannabes, the recent series of commentaries around Do No Harm, our story about people who desire to amputate a healthy limb. We’ll also be introducing some exciting changes at the Matter website — changes that will make the site better for readers, and improve our mechanism for supporting long-form writing.”

Medium, which Williams and Biz Stone launched in 2012, is a collaborative publishing platform that aims to let users write, annotate, read and recommend content in a clutter-free interface. The platform isn’t open to everyone yet; for now, a select group of authors are contributing. Matter is Medium’s first acquisition.

Williams spoke about the importance of long-form content at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference last year. Watch the video here:

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Rewind: 5 must see videos from RoadMap 2011

Om Malik — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 23:34:18 +0000

We are hosting our second GigaOM RoadMap conference on Monday, November 5, 2012 in San Francisco. It has an all-star speaker line-up that includes Perry Chen, CEO and co-founder of KickStarter, Evan Williams of Twitter & Obvious Corp., Kevin Systrom of Instagram, David Karp of Tumblr, Dave Gilboa of Warby Parker, Katia Beauchamp of Birchbox, Ben Silbermann of Pinterest and many more. Our theme for 2012 edition: designing our connected future.

Last year we talked about how connectedness changes everything. We thought it would be a good idea for us to rewind and share some of the conversations from the 2011 event as we work on the 2012 edition.

Jack Dorsey, Square & Twitter

Tony Fadell, Nest

Drew Houston, Dropbox

Brian Chesky, AirBnB

Matt Mullenweg, Automattic/Wordpress

The complete archives from GigaOM RoadMap 2011.

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Roll the Video: Twitter, the Story So Far

Om Malik — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 22:45:55 +0000

Twitter , the San Francisco-based micro-messaging company that is now said to be worth a whopping $10 billion didn’t start off that way. It was a germ of an idea that has become what I have often called, the megaphone for the planet. It is the living pulse of the Internet. It is a barometer of our collective grief, joy and anxieties.

Today, Twitter grapples with its future, trying to identify itself and more often than not, finding itself at odds with the very same people who have helped it achieve escape velocity. It is trying to transform itself from a phenomenon to a business.

The company’s story is told in this Bloomberg Game Changers video which profiles Twitter co-founders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone. As the earliest Twitter-user, I make a brief appearance in the video, wearing my favorite shirt ;-)

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Twitter Founders: Gladwell Got It Wrong

Liz Gannes — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 05:26:08 +0000

“Laughable,” “absurd,” “ludicrous” and “pointless” were words Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone used Monday night to describe a recent Malcolm Gladwell story in the New Yorker about the futility of social media to create real social change. Of course, you wouldn’t expect those two to agree with Gladwell’s thesis, but they offered valid critiques while speaking at an event for the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

Stone said he could see validity in Gladwell’s point that effecting meaningful and sustained social change requires strong relationships and hierarchical structure. But he added,

The real-time exchange of information — a service like Twitter — it would be absurd to think it’s not complementary to activism. When it really comes down to it, it’s not going to be technology that’s going to be the agent of change. It’s going to be people; it’s going to be humanity.

Williams, for his part, said of the Gladwell article, “It was a very well-constructed argument but it was kind of laughable. He pointed out that you don’t ever get much of anything done by just telling people you’re going to do it; you actually have to do it.

Twitter's Biz Stone and Evan Williams

“Anyone who’s claiming that sending a tweet by itself is activism, that’s ludicrous — but no one’s claiming that, at least no one that’s credible,” said Williams, who stepped down as Twitter CEO last week to focus on product and cede the role to more of a manager and business operator, former Twitter COO Dick Costolo.

“If you can’t organize you can’t activate,” Williams said, criticizing Gladwell for at one point conflating the editability of Wikipedia with Twitter. “I thought [the article] was entertaining but kind of pointless.”

Stone (at this point basically piling on) said he gave Gladwell props for mounting an argument against Twitter. “He could have stuck to email and texting,” Stone pointed out, which probably wouldn’t have instigated nearly such a large and viral discussion of the article.

The Twitter guys said they don’t want to take as much credit as some people have offered them for playing a role in catalyzing the Iranian election protests last year. Even though Twitter may have had little to do with actual citizen organization in Iran, it helped bring global attention to the events, they said. Williams disclosed that #iranelection was Twitter’s No. 1 trending topic in all of 2009.

As another example of Twitter being applied for social good, Stone brought up usage of Twitter after the Haiti earthquake in January, which included emergency services coordination but also was a major driver of publicity for text-message donation campaigns that generated record contributions.

Other tidbits from this Twitter founders’ conversation with BusinessWeek’s Brad Stone:

Williams pointed out that his new product role is his fourth position at Twitter (in as many years). He said of promoting Costolo, “I thought I could be more useful doing that role, and Dick could do my role better.”
Biz Stone said that Twitter doesn’t have too much of a problem with censoring pornographic tweets. “It’s hard to get super porny in 140 characters,” he said, joking, “That ASCII art is going to have to be pretty sophisticated.”
Twitter is not prioritizing making its service available in China, where it is currently blocked: “China’s very big but there’s lots to do in the rest of the world,” said Williams.
Like Facebook expects to hit 1 billion users, Williams said Twitter will get to 1 billion members too. Biz Stone added “Not the same billion.” Brad Stone asked when. Williams replied “In the future.”
Williams said that he thinks an interesting and unexploited use of Twitter would be to create an account that “just retweets other tweets” on a topic, like the best of San Francisco or baseball. Not everyone has to produce content, he said; you can also help curate and spread good stuff.

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Image courtesy Flickr user evhead.

Twitter's One Real Problem. No, Not Developers!

Om Malik — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 04:00:28 +0000

Photo of Twitter co-founder & CEO Ev Williams by Randy Stewart via Flickr.

A few days back, I stopped by at the brand-new Palo Alto, Calif. offices of Facebook. It is a gigantic open space, with desks lined up next to each other as far as the eye could see. Interiors that could provide an apt backdrop for an IKEA catalog. Big screens, Macs and PCs and engineers with headphones tap-tapping on their keyboards. To a Silicon Valley long-timer like myself, in the words of The New York Yankees legend Yogi Berra, it was like déjà vu all over again.

You walk around the office and as an outsider you suddenly feel less smart as you feel brain waves bouncing off you. A quick chat about engagement advertising, a conversation about super-sized data centers and a 30-minute gab session about the future of activity streams -– all this at arms length. Add suits to this mix and you are looking at a fearsome combination of brains and business. So when I walked into a meeting with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, I said: “This feels like an old-fashioned technology company — congratulations!” It’s old-fashioned in its invention of the future.

By now you must be wondering — what has this got to do with Twitter and its problems? How about — everything!

Why? Because the future of these two companies are intertwined! They are the Kane & Abel of our new pulsating two-way, near-real-time Internet. Together, they dominate the zeitgeist. They are the future of communications and interactions. They already have a large portion of our Internet attention. To put it simply, they are competing for essentially what is the next evolution of the Internet: The People Web.

If Facebook’s vision of the Internet is about an Internet connected to Facebook’s brain via hooks, then San Francisco-based Twitter is the anti-Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg and his troops are marching like an all-conquering Roman Army that will soon enough cross the billion-dollar (in revenues) threshold. And they control their own destiny.

In comparison, Twitter at present feels like a benign United Nations Force. Forget the obvious metrics such as subscribers (where Facebook has a big lead over Twitter), what I’m talking about are the two companies and where they are in their corporate lifecycles. Twitter, despite its recent growth spurt, is still a pre-pubescent. The introduction of a somewhat ambiguous and tenuous business model based on an ideal called “resonance” shows how much work is ahead of Twitter.

Back to the Future

In order to understand the steep road ahead, one has to go back to the earliest days of Twitter and see how it has transformed since its launch on a fateful night in 2006. Over the past three years or so, I’ve watched it go through three phases:

Phase One: Twitter was initially a messaging service with its primary role being connecting distributed group of friends via SMS and the web. It used the SMS clients of the cell phone and that was it. It later launched a web version of the service.

Phase Two: Twitter, when it released an API, became a platform that in turn spawned hundreds of applications that used the API, which led to several million dollars being invested in the Twitter ecosystem, betting that Twitter would eventually become the platform of the new social web. (Read: Social Atoms and the Twitter Ecosystem)

Phase Three: Twitter is trying to be a product and then a platform. In the process of doing so, the company is “filling holes” in its current offering, as described by one of Twitter’s early backers, VC Fred Wilson. The acquisition of Tweetie was merely the start of phase three. (For a common sense explanation, check out this comment by a GigaOM reader.)

While Twitter’s actions might have raised the ire of third-party developers, leading to furious hand-wringing, the company is doing what it needs to do: justify its $1 billion valuation and figure out a way to become a business that can be sold — either to a corporate buyer or someday to public market investors. That’s why I don’t really fault Twitter trying to be a product in addition to being a platform. Now here is where things get interesting.

So far, by not focusing on being a product and instead being a platform of the People Web, Twitter has been viewed as a company that would help weave a social fabric across the web by providing a social graph and an identity system. The developers then could dream up fancy products that would attract more people to the Twitter fabric. However, reality often comes in the way of utopia.

Twitter needs to build a “product” in order to make money. Sure one way to make some quick dollars is to sell its data stream to Microsoft and Google, but to me that’s like selling the mining rights to a gold mine instead of panning for gold yourself. No wonder the company has to fill the holes.

Herein lies the rub –- the company will need time to build (or cobble together) this product, figure out a way to generate revenues and at the same time build and scale a massive infrastructure that would support Twitter and its ecosystem. And that is precisely Twitter’s weakness.

Fear of a Facebook Planet

On the flip side, Facebook is moving in the exact opposite direction. It already has a product: Facebook.com. It is making hundreds of millions of dollars from it. It has a platform, but that wasn’t good enough, so it is going to introduce a new, vastly improved one at its upcoming F8 conference in San Francisco later this month. In a conversation earlier this year, Facebook’s platform engineering chief, Mike Vernal, told us that Facebook.com was nothing more than “info aggregation with a great photos app.”

Using the Open Graph API, Facebook wants to turn any plain web site — say, CNN — into a Facebook page, giving it the ability to collect fans, publish stories to their Facebook stream and appear in the social networking site’s search results. (Read: Why Facebook Connect Matters and Why it Will Win.)

Liz put it best when she summed up our visit to Facebook by saying, “Though Facebook fan pages on the surface seem like a response to Twitter — allowing celebrities to collect fans who are not actually their real-world friends — they’re bigger than that. Facebook has trained 350 million users to publicly post-personal endorsements. In other words, it has an army of volunteers ready to organize the web on its behalf.” Now you can also understand why Facebook is building its data centers, buying thousands of servers and spending millions of dollars on developing a massive software library.

Facebook.com (or Facebook Mobile) allows the company to make money. Facebook Connect is the platform (read: tentacles) that makes it possible for Facebook to collect data from across the web, organize it for the People Web and in the process, make more money.

What is to Chirp About?

Tomorrow, Twitter is going to host its first developer conference, Chirp. I am going to be very interested in knowing and learning about how they are thinking about the future and how quickly they are going to rev up their machine. The good news is that they have some great people who have built awesome products in the past — Dick Costolo (COO) and UX expert Doug Bowman are amongst the most well known apart from the co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone — especially on their engineering team.

Nevertheless, what Twitter says or doesn’t say will in many ways define the outcome of this great (web) game. Zuck’s Army is on the move. Twitter is still assembling its troops. Whichever way you look at it — that is truly Twitter’s real big problem!

Photo of Twitter co-founder & CEO Ev Williams by Randy Stewart via Flickr. (CC)

Oprah Is Keeping Twitter Hot

Om Malik — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 22:02:07 +0000

Twitter Founder Ev Williams went on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” to talk about his San Francisco-based micro-messaging startup, and in the process turned his red hot company hotter. It’s not clear how many people are going to sign up for the service following the broadcast of Oprah’s show (and her subsequent twittering), but one thing is for sure: It was going to test Twitter’s infrastructure. And so far, Twitter has passed with flying colors. As Rich Greenfield, analyst with Pali Capital wrote this morning: “Oprah is more of a ‘movement’ than a TV personality or entertainer (and the movement is called ‘Live Your Best Life’). Consumers across the world listen and absorb whatever Oprah does/says and today she has begun to Twitter.”

According to web site traffic monitoring service AlertSite, so far the Oprah bump hasn’t brought down Twitter’s web site, even though there was a significant increase in the response time for the site. Ken Godskind, chief strategy officer of AlertSite said: “Twitter didn’t behave any different because the Big O showed up and Twitter was holding up better today than earlier this month.” In other words, Twitter prepared well for the big event.

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Microsoft Finally Found a Group They Can Impress

Tom Reestman — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:00:38 +0000

Joe Wilcox has an article on Microsoft Watch about Microsoft’s new ads with kids. The series is called The Rookies, and there’s a second spot up.

Joe is less impressed with the second spot than the first, but goes on to explain how these ads have potential, Microsoft needs more of them (I’m sure more are coming), the kid should get an ‘A’ on the project, etc.

That’s all nice, but it misses an awkward thing about this whole series. Cute? Yes. I’ve liked them both. But then we all know kids and animals are everyone’s favorite commercial subjects. Still, why isn’t anybody stating the obvious? When you’re 4 and a half or 7 years old you have no idea what the phrase “I’m a PC” is supposed to mean.

Joe mentions the buzz Apple got with the old Switcher ads, but those were adults making real decisions. What can these kids do? Explain why mommy or daddy got a PC? Can they even tell us what a “PC” is? If you think Kylie and Alexa wouldn’t have been equally “impressed” if Mom or Dad were using Macs, or Linux, or something by Fisher-Price, you’re kidding yourself.

As near as I can tell, Microsoft has opted to use a group that can’t truly speak for itself. But maybe that was the only choice left:

They tried getting teens and 20-somethings with “The Social,” and failed.
They tried getting young adults with “Wow!”, and failed.
They tried getting older adults with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates, and failed.
They tried getting non-technical adults with “Mojave Experiment,” and failed.
They tried getting any adults with the initial volley of “I’m a PC,” and failed since a) they’ve moved on, and b) each one affirms what Apple has said all along: A Mac is not a PC, it’s better.

So now Microsoft has cute kids — using whatever their parents put in front of them — proclaiming they’re a PC. Fine. Maybe it’ll pull in some sales for them. If so, good for them. Personally, I think Microsoft has had to set the bar too low in terms of who their software is supposed to impress. Then again, Microsoft Live Photo Gallery isn’t likely to impress the average iPhoto user, presuming they’re old enough to make a choice.

For me, I’m less inclined to look for the next Mikey or Oscar Mayer bologna kid in one of these ads, and more curious to see when Microsoft will move on to the next logical group: Animals. With the Super Bowl well out of the way, I’m sure the Budweiser Clydesdales are available.

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A Brief History of Twitter

Om Malik — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:35:59 +0000

Dom Sagolla, formerly of Odeo Corp., corporate predecessor of Obvious Corp., the company behind Twitter, tells the story of the micro-messaging service that has caught the imagination of everyone from from tech mommies to cable news networks, sports stars and Hollywood stars. It has become a source of breaking news and rumors. It is the new pulsating heart of the real-time Internet. It was born at a time when Odeo was facing a rather bleak future:

“Rebooting” or reinventing the company started with a daylong brainstorming session where we broke up into teams to talk about our best ideas. I was lucky enough to be in @Jack’s group, where he first described a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing.

I remember that @Jack’s first use case was city-related: telling people that the club he’s at is happening. “I want to have a dispatch service that connects us on our phones using text.”

Work on the project started on March 31, 2006. @Jack is Jack Dorsey, until recently the CEO of Twitter. He wrote the version 0.1 with Noah Glass, who showed me Twitter, back when it was known as Twttr, at a party in SOMA in San Francisco. That very night I wrote a short blog post about the service:

Twttr has married Short Code Messaging, SMS with a way to create social groups. By sending a text message to a short code (for TWTTR) you can send your location information, your mood information or whatever and share it with people who are on your social-mob! Best part – no installation necessary!

Thanks to an early jump, I got the @Om handle for my Twitter account. Reading that original post, I am amazed at how much has changed in two-and-a-half years. For Twitter, web has become the primary focus. The company has received a $500 million buyout offer, not to mention criticism for not being able to keep the service working all the time.

As Dom points out, over time, much of the original team from Odeo was let go — including Glass. Odeo became Obvious Corp., and, well, the rest is history. Now, the company is rumored to be valued at $250 million and is on its way to becoming the next hot platform on the web.

My Select Twitter related posts:

1. On Twitter, Followers Aren’t Really Friends.
2. In Twitter’s Scoble Problem, a Business Model.
3. Why Twitter shouldn’t sell.
4. With Summize, Twitter to buy a clue

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Ev Williams: Twitter Not Limiting Followers

Om Malik — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:02:26 +0000

Updated with comments from Twitter: Dave Winer points to a series of discussions and blog posts about Twitter allegedly limiting people to 2,000 followers. In his opinion, it is a good idea, because “the expensive thing in Twitter is distributing status messages to large numbers of queues.” Actually, Twitter isn’t doing anything formal. Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, left a comment in response to an earlier version of a post that explains it all.

I’m afraid this has gotten confused. There is no limit to the number of followers you can have. There is a limit to the number of people you can *follow*. This is mostly to reduce spam and depends on a number of factors. More details here: (link)

In other words, there are no such limits. Earlier reports were based There is no official word from Twitter, and all on a couple of blog posts and status messages, where people reported that they were running into the 2,000 follower problem.

On their web site, the only limits Twitter talks about are: 1,000 total updates a day, 250, direct messages per day, and 100 API requests. If the San Francisco-based company is indeed going in this direction, it wouldn’t be as hard to see them adopting a fremium model. A post on Statisfaction forums indicates that the follow limits are more recent and were prompted by the nefarious Twitter-spammers, but there are some on the Twitter forum who are unhappy about any kind of limits.

In my blog post from May 2008 about their infrastructure problems, and how they can deal with it, I had suggested that they should limit the followers, charge for additional followers and messages.

$10 a month for 1,000 subscribers. 25,000 subscribers means someone like Scoble should be paying them around $250 a month. Let’s take it a step further. Twitter should limit people to 500 free messages a month. Any more should come in a bucket of, say, 1,000 messages for $10…. This would also fit the Freemium business model that Twitter investor Fred Wilson so loves.

Anyway, that post got mixed reactions. Some agreed and others didn’t much care for my proposed pricing structure. Regardless, if Too bad this rumor is not true, then this is a step in the right direction for the company as it helps them get a handle on their infrastructure and scaling issues.

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Found|LINKS Mar 22 – Mar 29

Carleen Hawn — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:24:19 +0000

Here’s this week’s list of stories we may have missed, but which you shouldn’t.

1) Why we make misjudgments: On Tues. Mar 25, our friends at VentureHacks did a better job than I did of editing-down Marc Andreessen’s latest opus on cognitive bias, which is based on investor-lawyer Charlie Munger’s theories of “25 key forms of human behavior that lead to misjudgment and error, derived from Mr. Munger’s 60 years of business experience.” Mr. Munger is the longtime investing partner of Warren Buffett. Marc’s essay, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6., is worth reading, but try the VentureHacks version first. You might also want to check out Mr. Munger’s book: Poor Charlie’s Almanack.

2) Ideas/Business Models: OK, it’s becoming a Twitter world. Could it be that now, instead of a Facebook app, you’ll need to write a Twitter app? Do your employees use Twitter? And ask yourself: does your company or business have a Twitter-play? With the access to consumers Twitter offers, it won’t take long for this platform will be monetized, big time. You need to be ready to take advantage. To wit: from blogger-founder Loic le Mur we get this list of 58 Twitter apps. Check it out.

3) Founder profile: And speaking of Twitter, for a glimpse inside a the mind of another role model, read 10 Questions for Ev Williams, from Inc. magazine’s March issue. See also Max Chafkin’s profile of Ev, Anything Could Happen. Or if you’re pressed for time, our crib sheet of it, published Mar. 26: Do as Ev Says, and as Ev Does.

4) And related: reread Ev Williams’ magnum opus, dating from 2005!: Ten Rules for Web Startups .

5) How to be sticky: “If you want to succeed, you need people to remember and act on your ideas. For instance, if you are a leader, you want people to catch your vision.” F|R wrote on this very topic in November, but this week Life Optimizer published a great summary of Stanford Professor Chip Heath’s book: Made to Stick: why some ideas survive and others die. It’s written with his brother Dan. Read this post, and you don’t have to buy the book!

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