The man with the Midas touch – Part 2
A portal with prospects
But Twitter’s potential to make money is thought to be enormous. It already has millions of users around the world. To compare: Facebook has 180 million registered users. And it was this larger player on the social networking market that made Williams an offer. Was he going to be admitted into the pantheon of the Web 2.0 community? And was this news spread on the quiet or was it deliberately released by the management? When Facebook started talks with Twitter about a possible acquisition last fall, someone present at the negotiations let slip to journalists just what sums of money were involved. Newspapers, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, spread rumors that Facebook had offered 500 million dollars. And spurred on by its latent gold-rush mentality, the industry hailed Williams as the new star of the Web 2.0 world. But he refused to sell.
Biding his time?
Was the price not right? Or did Williams want to set a new record? (Google bought YouTube two years ago for 1.6 billion.) “It wasn’t time,” explains Williams. “It’s good that expectations are so high but just give us a bit more time,” he said at a CIO Q&A event at the Churchill Club in San Francisco at the end of February this year. Williams, as ever, appeared calm and reserved, in a likeable way – presenting a convincing argument without wanting the auditorium to erupt into raucous applause.
Williams and Twitter have been the biggest Web sensation since MySpace and Facebook. Even more so since Time Magazine hailed him as one of the most influential people in the cyber world last September and Business Week named him as one of the top 25 movers and shakers of the industry. And Williams implies that he’s working on new ideas.
So is he not the visionary we think he is, a man of action who reaches for new business models as quickly as he reaches for his iPhone or Blackberry? “Founding a company is like being stranded on a desert island,” Williams writes on evhead: “It’s an adventure and it’s fun.”
Setting the pace for online media
The start-up’s CEO is also interested in what critics have to say – particularly the ones who feared Twitter would alter the face of classic media too quickly. The BBC and the New York Times have already integrated Twitter as a media channel. However, others say his service outdoes conventional media in terms of speed, but accuse it of allowing unfiltered messages to reach the public without first being critically assessed by journalists.
In fall 2007, at a time when Twitter still had relatively few German users, national newspaper Die Zeit suggested, “People who become accustomed to the Twitter pace suddenly find emails and blogs very slow and clunky – like electric typewriters.” But Williams assures critics time and again, as he did recently on the online forum TED.com, “New media don’t kill old media, they complement each other – like blogs and newspapers. They’re all part of an ecosystem.” And to publish this message as a tweet, he would have had to strike the keyboard 140 times. Evan Williams sees every change as an opportunity and every opportunity as a challenge. And slowly but surely, the man is definitely making his way.
