Interview with Twitter’s Biz Stone

Well, it seems that Biz Stone reads Blog Bloke after all. Further to my recent rant about improvements Twitter needs to make, this is what he said in an interview today with ZDNet.

Question:  What is the most requested feature?

Grouping has consistently been high on the request list and is high on the list of what we are considering. We’ve been giving it thought and examining how people have been using Twitter for a while so we can best approach that feature. People have their work contacts and their friends and they want to be able to follow and update separately.

We also want to connect it to individual posts. When I see a Twitter update I look to see if its text or Web; text it colors it in a different way. I visualize the person out doing what they are posting. We want to find a way to better convey this contextual information. Read more…

Biz claims that his first priority is to harden Twitter’s reliability. He boasts having tons of investment money. He also says that he’s not concerned about competitors.

I wish I could share his optimism. My advice is he needs to go all out and buy the best engineers available right now. Especially at this crucial juncture when the service is still relatively new.

He needs to establish Twitter’s position that it was the first of its type and the innovator in the market or those copycats nipping at his heels just might end up taking the ball away from him.