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Twitter’s Growth Slowing But Not For Long

Evan Williams, one of the co-founders of Twitter, was one of highlighted opening sessions at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Fransisco, Tuesday.  And Williams, revealed that he believes Twitter’s future will be bright with some of the new changes coming to the site.  

John Battelle, from Federated Media Publishing, hosted the chat and tried to get Williams to spill Twitter’s marketing revenue model to see if the site would eventually turn into a revenue-churning business.  Although Williams wouldn’t really answer the question, he did go onto say, “It’s not like we are spending our days looking under couch cushions for the elusive revenue model. Obviously, we are thinking about it.”

“We have a class of users who are trying to do different things,” said Williams, “Part of the reason Twitter is hard to nail down, is because there are so many different type of users, doing  really different things.”  He further went on to say with the amount of business’ on the site for example, Twitter is looking at ways to appeal accounts more gears towards those specific users, and offer services that they would be willing to pay for.

Twitter’s growth of users has started to level off here in the US, however is still increasing dramatically in countries such as Brazil, Japan, and the United Kingdom.  Williams is optimistic, saying he thinks the US’s growth will start increasing once again very soon. “Our US Twitter.com growth has slowed temporarily and there are some things we will be launching that we think will pick that back up.”

One of those changes is removing a section of the website known as ‘Suggested Followers,’ which is a list full of celebrities, major corporations, and organizations that users maybe interested in following.  However, within the past week, Twitter has released Lists Beta, to a small sample of Twitter users, who will be able to create a list of followers and narrow them into different categories.  Those lists will be made public and users can scroll through those lists and find new people or companies to follow.  Creators of those lists will also be able to click on the category and receive updates from people in that specific list. 

To watch the entire session from yesterday, you can visit the Web 2.0 Summit YouTube page.  You are also able to watch certain sessions live on the Summit’s website.