Micro-blogging service Twitter will be introducing premium features for business users by year-end, co-founder Biz Stone said Tuesday.
While Stone and his fellow co-founder, Evan Williams, have long floated the idea of commercial accounts, “we’re only just now entering a phase in Twitter’s lifetime where we’re able to develop new products,” Stone said in an interview. He was in Chicago last night, making a presentation at Columbia College.
Much of the last couple of years have been spent building up Twitter’s infrastructure to keep pace with rapid growth, Stone said.
By the end of the year, he plans to introduce features for corporate users that will “make them better Twitterers.” The site will remain free for all users, including businesses. But commercial users may pay more for features such as analytics, which would allow them to monitor traffic and the behavior of people who “follow” them on Twitter.
Speaking broadly about how people use Twitter, Stone said he’s observed them “performing this social alchemy — this process that takes place when you decide to share information openly.” An individual tweeting that he’s drinking a beer at a particular bar may not be significant, for example. But if someone else who’s in the area sees that tweet and joins the first person, and they come up with a new business idea, they’ve turned “lead into gold,” Stone said.
“Twitter has always been about getting people away from their computer” so they go out into the world, then report back what they’ve seen, Stone said.
He believes this phenomenon has the potential for social change, rather than simply feeding consumers’ addiction to their computer and mobile phone screens. Earlier this year, for example, protesters in Iran used Twitter to communicate with each other and disseminate information to millions of readers worldwide.
“We’re moving faster and moving as one,” Stone said. “People are becoming more engaged … By all of us being more informed, we’re becoming more empathetic.”