Williams shot back, “You’ll have to ask Mark that. You missed your opportunity,” referring to Batelle’s interview with Zuckerberg just 24 hours earlier on the same stage in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit conference.

Williams, a Twitter co-founder known to many as simply @Ev, noted that Facebook blocked Twitter users from checking their Facebook friends to find which of them were also on Twitter. And that annoyed him.

“We’d like our users to tap into Facebook to make their Twitter experience better,” Williams said. “But I understand their position. They see the social graph as their core asset. We are talking to them often to see if there is a way to work together, but so far no side has found a way to work together.”

The debate over control has been a theme of the conference. Zuckerberg used his time on stage trying to say Facebook is both open and a platform, while simultaneously defending his company’s refusal to let users export their Facebook friends’ email addresses to other services. While Zuckerberg tries to paint it as protecting user privacy, it’s clearly just a business strategy to not give out the recipe on how to replicate a user’s social connections on another site.

Williams recently stepped aside as CEO to allow Dick Costello to take over the company’s operations so Williams could focus more on deciding how Twitter will evolve.

Twitter has long faced the question of “What’s your business model?” But the company is now making money from advertisers buying “promoted” tweets and trends, as well as a service announced today to allow trend mining companies to license up to half-of Twitter’s stream to analyze but not republish.

Williams seemed pleased, but not ecstatic about the ad program, saying they have about 40 advertisers now and will have more than a hundred by the end of the year.

“The math seems good and most of the advertisers are coming back,” Williams said. “There are a million ways to make money with Twitter and we’ll probably try dozens more.”

As for what’s next, the company is working to help users handle the problem of information overload, so that users don’t start reducing the number of people they follow.

“Figuring out relevance in real time is a non-trivial problem,” Williams said. “It is inevitable we will focus on this a lot more.”

Follow us for disruptive tech news: Ryan Singel and Epicenter on Twitter.

See Also:

• Twitter CEO Evan Williams Steps Aside, To ‘Product Strategy’ Role
• Twitter’s Evan Williams Hosts a Twitter Q&A
• Twitter Unveils Ad-Supported Business Model
• @Twitter Users #Fail as Branding Automatons

Authors: Ryan Singel

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