News Bits: Twitter CEO Evan Williams, Man of Mystery

Written by Erin Barker

Wednesday, December 3. 2008 at 11:35 AM EST Post a comment

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In an appearance at the Churchill Club in San Francisco last night, Twitter Inc. CEO Evan Williams explained again that it just "wasn't the right time" for Facebook and Twitter to get together. But more importantly, he promised that revenue was on the way in the first quarter of 2009. Of course, we still don't really know how.

Williams continued to hint mysteriously about Twitter's top-secret, for-Evan's-eyes-only revenue strategy, reassuring us that "We will make money, and I can't say exactly how because... we can't predict how the businesses we're in will work." Alright then.

He rejected the idea of selling ads, saying instead that Twitter will find a way to charge business to talk to customers or sell products via Twitter. According to The New York Times, companies like JetBlue Airways, Dell, and Whole Foods Market have used Twitter in this way before, but Twitter "[hasn't] studied the business cases much. We literally have no business people in the company, so this isn't an area we're really focused on," said Williams.

Some other confidence-inspiring quotes from Williams's talk:

• "[Twitter's biggest threat] is people who now see the concept... and say, 'Oh, we can do that better.' They could kick our butt."
  
  
• "It's amazing anyone uses Twitter today. It's hard." 

And in other news: