A Mobile World Congress 2011 keynote address from Twitter’s chief executive officer Dick Costolo gave a lot of insight into the company’s thought process, even though Twitter did not launch any new products.
Dick Costolo wants his service to be like plumbing –useful and present in the background. That’s why he doesn’t want users to learn anything new about the interface when they switch between devices, as the process should be an intuitive one. The company is pursuing seamless integration with several handset equipment manufacturers and mobile carriers.
In this context, he said Twitter should work like water in the desert; people who need it should always be able to find a way to use it. About half the Twitter users access the service from more than one device, whereas about 40 per cent tweets come from mobile users.
Twitter has also introduced a crowd-sourced translation platform where Russian, Indonesian and Turkish tweets will be translated. There are doubts, however, about the number of people who would like to follow people tweeting in another language.