Tomorrow’s Real Time CrunchUp in San Francisco is going to be a blast. It’s an all day event absolutely filled with the thought and business leaders in the space, as well as a whole slew of newcomers launching new startups.
And we’re starting off with a bang. Twitter COO Dick Costolo is on stage first for thirty minutes of cold war style interrogation by Steve Gillmor and me.
And we want your help.
Let us know in the comments what questions you’d like us to ask. We can’t promise that Costolo will answer those questions, but we can guarantee that we’ll ask them. And if your proposed questions are good enough, you can get into the event. We’ll give up to five passes (the last seats in the house) to anyone with deeply insightful ideas. Just make sure to use your real email.
Don’t limit yourself to Twitter-related stuff, either. If Twitter is willing to give advice to Rupert Murdoch on how to run his newspapers, then absolutely anything goes.
I’m looking forward to meeting everyone tomorrow in person, if not at the event then at the party afterwards. See you there.
is Dick pissed he didn’t think of @ShitSaccaSays ?
How is Twitter’s eventual monetization strategy going to affect average users?
What extra security measures, if any, is Twitter now implementing due to confidential documents being leaked and what advice do they have for startups to prevent this from happening?
We have our first winner!
Can I get some plane tickets too?
hahahah nice one
nice
I like how they’re giving these tickets away the night before.
If you can’t go, I’ll have your ticket.
Whoa whoa whoa. Interview? I was only responding to the free breakfast burrito offer.
I’ll do the interview if Gillmor tells us when he’s going to trade one of the L’s in his name for the missing E, like everybody else (see Gilmore colon Girls comma Gary).
winner! you get a free ticket, Dick.
Dear Mr.Costolo,
Please explain how twitter can afford to pay for such lavish office space, as we’ve seen pictures of all over the web. Yet there is no solid revenue stream, and hardly any pictures of employees actually working. With all of the (in)stability issues (that have gotten relatively “better” over time) – that have plagued twitter over the years, aren’t you worried that the picture you’re painting of the company is very reminiscent of what happened when the first bubble burst?
You’re taking the freemium model to an extreme (yes, you’ve licensed the firehouse) – while running out of time to release a business model.
How many of your users would stick around if you started charging? How many would flock to the next best thing? How much time do you think you have? As I see it, in one year the landscape can change dramatically, so what are you waiting for?
And saying “the product isn’t there yet” won’t work anymore. If it’s ready for primetime Oprah, and stable enough to break news before traditional media, it’s time to start focusing on making money, right? Becoming an actual (dare I say it) revenue generating company?
With warm regards,
Aviv Hadar
Think Brilliant Media Studios
Typo fix: *firehose
In addition… I’m not trying to win a ticket, I genuinely want to know this stuff.
Do you see FourSquare as a true competitor in the geolocation field and, if so, in which direction do you see the eventual advertising dollars? Is FourSquare a threat in general considering it has an incentive for users using its product (i.e. mayorship and other specials)? If yes, will Twitter be replicating those features with a native client of their own?
And here’s winner #2!
Sadly, I can’t make it from Florida…consolation?
You can always give it to @netspencer and let him ask it for me…
Great question! You deserve your ticket.
what will be the business model of twitter in future for sustainable revenues? What do Costolo think is required to keep the users attracted and maintaining the user base?
With Twitter being an open platform, and many developers already having created businesses based on that platform (TwitPic, CoTweet, etc) how do you see the core functionality being expanded without upsetting your developer community?
“real time” is gaining steam at the same time “location” is (location awareness for mobile and PC). How will the two intersect? and could that be the basis for a Twitter monetization strategy? i.e. driving foot traffic and offline conversions for large and small businesses?
With more and more features wanted and being added, how do you maintain the micro-blogging feel without becoming a macro-portal. Or is that a direction Twitter may be going to?
Considering Google botched Feedburner’s implementation post-acquisition, would he vote against a sale of Twitter to Google?
Mr. Costolo: Why has Twitter has suddenly become very unstable and buggy since you started?
Are they paying you?
(Just kidding Dick
What types of architectural initiatives are underway to continue improving uptime and how has your previous experience framed the way you view Twitter’s continuing technical problems? Is the team any closer to getting ahead of the curve?
How will you maintain the growth curve of your user base without plateauing any time soon? What else can be integrated besides geolocation to further inject a value exchange into the act of tweeting? Particularly among new users or age groups that you haven’t appealed to as much? And do you risk alienating core user base by broadening the the feature set?
How does Twitter plan to use geo-location to provide real-time, local information to users? Do you have any plans to possibly monetize this?
Winner #3
I can’t go. You really should have done this contest a little bit earlier than the day before.
I think it’s awesome that none of the winners can go and they all offered to give me their ticket.
How did you convince VC’s to give 100m with out any business model?
What’s happening?
How is Twitter gonna make money in the year 2012?
what is your reaction to amazon.com’s new twitter integration? Preparing short affiliate link for associates.
Question for Costolo: Will Twitter please consider a Netscape-like IPO at the earliest? If not, why not? Do you not realize that Twitter is as fundamental as Netscape was for its time?
With the flood of Twitter clients, do you see selectively offering (or selling) API’s to developers that agree to configure features to mirror the website? Lists, retweets, etc. might be more readily adopted if built in to popular, officially sanctioned, clients.
Search is an important component of the real time. Twitter search did not really change in the last months and does not leverage the information available, neither in the real time search (if I search any trending topic like “New Moon”, I just get an overflow of Tweets) nor in the historical search (how do I find the first Tweet relating the Hudson Bay plane crash, or the name of the restaurant I remember someone recommended in Napa Valley). What is the search strategy; is Twitter mainly relying on partnerships (Bing, Google) to provide better indexation?
How long before we run out of IPv6 addresses and crash the real time web?
How much fresher can we expect search results when combined with human attention data?
Applications like Yammer are extending Twitter-like real-time information inside the enterprise, and as a result of a more targeted audience are able to deliver features in a more agile manner. Do you expect Twitter to target these markets, and if so, what changes do you think are necessary to accomplish this pivot?
There seems to be alot of porn and bots and with kids using Twitter what are the plans to keep Twitter thought provocative and safe?
What can Twitter do to become an even more effective tool for combating tyranny? Are there any specific initiatives in the company related to achieving this goal?
1. Once we’ve done real time with location, what’s next? Where can twitter go after location? (Not that location and huge amounts of real time unstructured data aren’t interesting, I just want to know what’s next.)
2. What’s the twitter vision of identity on the web, and how does twitter fit in to it? (Compare, contrast to OpenID/facebook connect.)
3. Why do people seem to be so violent on forums like this towards a company that has not sent representatives to egg their house and kicked their dog?
winner #5, for the first question.
How will Twitter address the additional layers it adds to the user’s experience?
For example, Twitter has created a need for URL shorteners. In the future, if Bit.ly or Ow.ly were to shut down, any tweet with a shortened link will be rendered useless.
As an additional example, instead of providing a picture storage system, Twitter users rely on services like TwitPic and YFrog to provide image hosting. Once again, it would be as if millions of images suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
How distraught are you that “New Moon” is the top trending topic on Twitter? You realize that you’re helping to proliferate all that is wrong with humanity right?