Twitter's Internal Strategy Laid Bare: To Be "The Pulse Of The Planet"

On Tuesday evening more than 300 confidential Twitter documents and screenshots landed in our inbox. We said we were going to post a handful of them only, and we’ve spent much of the last 36 hours talking directly to Twitter about the right way to go about doing that. We’ll have more to say on that process in a couple of days.

The documents include employment agreements, calendars of the founders, new employee interview schedules, phone logs and bills, alarm settings, a financial forecast, a pitch for a Twitter TV show, confidentiality agreements with companies such as AOL, Dell, Ericsson, and Nokia, a list of employee dietary restrictions, credit card numbers, Paypal and Gmail screen shots, and much more.

These are the last two documents we are going to share: a subset of the detailed notes from a set of executive meetings that took place between February 12 and June 9, 2009. Much of the information in these notes is either personal in nature (new hires, etc.) or too sensitive to share. What’s interesting of the rest we are posting here with our commentary. These notes include never-before revealed discussions between Twitter and Google, Microsoft, and others, as well as details of product planning, company goals, employee retention, and new proposed terms of service and APIs. Even acquisition targets such as CoTweet and Twitpic are discussed (and sometimes dismissed). It’s important to note that we have been given the green light by Twitter to post this information – They aren’t happy about it, but they are able to live with it, they say (more on why they did that in our later post).

One other caveat – as we’ve said before, these documents are rough meeting notes, not polished documents meant for broad consumption. There are lots of typos and outdated information. But on the plus side, the rawness of it shows the dedication and deep commitment of this team to making Twitter into a world-class company.

Finally, there are some details about partner discussions, particularly around Google and Microsoft, that we are just not going to publish. Twitter has been in negotiations with both companies around a broad set of transactions for months. But we aren’t going to go into great detail about exactly what has been discussed, or Twitter’s strategies toward those negotiations. So while it looks like there is a lot of detail around those discussions below, the most sensitive stuff has been removed.