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| SUN VALLEY, ID - JULY 10: Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter founder and CEO of Square, arrives for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 10, 2012 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have been invited to attend the conference which begins Tuesday. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife) |
Is Twitter a Media or Technology Company?
Twitter is some variation of both. “I think of the company is a technology company that is in the media business,” Mr. Costolo told a room full of editors and reporters. “Our business is an advertising business, we don’t sell technology.” .... the company does not have any reporters or a newsroom, and almost half of its 1,300 employees are engineers, focused on building the technology that runs Twitter and inventing new features for the service. .... “I don’t need to be or want to be in the content business.” ...... Twitter employees who work with celebrities, politicians, athletes and media outlets to hone the best use of the service. “We call them V.I.T.’s internally, Very Important Tweeters .... Costolo still sees the company as a communication platform above all else.
Twitter pours almost all its resources into engineering. And so it is a technology company. Twitter users produce content. True. But Twitter Inc. does not.
But that answer is true only when you ask to pick. If you don't bother asking if Twitter is a technology company or a media company, then you realize those demarcations are perhaps not that relevant. It is both. For Twitter Inc. it is a technology company. For the hundreds of millions of Twitter users it is a media company. It is a communication company. Twitter does many things that a telephone days, only better.
To ask if Twitter is a technology or a media company is a false question.
The Blind Men and the Elephant
Is Twitter a pillar?
