I’ve come to know Dick Costolo, COO at Twitter, pretty well in the past year, though I’ve known him for much longer. FM and his previous company, Feedburner, had a deal in the early days of RSS, and I’ve always liked his point of view on our industry. Feedburner was acquired by Google, and Dick spent a short year or so there before moving on to Twitter.
Since he joined, Twitter has rolled out a ton of new features, (mostly) fixed its platform stability issues, launched a beta trial of its advertising platform (Promoted Tweets), and managed to grow a few orders of magnitude to over 100 million uniques.
I interviewed Dick at Twitter’s Chirp conference last month, and I look forward to doing it again at the CM Summit week after next. What would you like to hear from him? Leave me your thoughts in the comments, thanks!
Update: And don’t forget to add your comments for Hilary Schneider, Arianna Huffington, Tony Hsieh, Tim Armstrong, Omar Hamoui, and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.
There are quite a few interesting question I would love to hear his thoughts about:
– what does Twitter want to be in a few years?
the underlying messaging and news protocol for the web?
A real time/location based search engine?
A client service for communicating with friends and brands?
– how does Twitter plan to manage the fact that there is no technical way to really measure exposure and engagement of twits? You can see how many followers and retweets, but no real views (compare to page views and clicks on the rest of the web).
– Is the fight for geo places database is the new fight after the one on the social graph, does Twitter plan to be the one stop for it (with the acquisition of GeoAPI) or will they work with others to create one open database for everyone?
What is Twitter’s strategy with search? What are the ways, besides helping users decide who to follow, that you can help people better find relevant content on Twitter?
In my opinion, both @Shahar Nechmad and @Soren’s questions are very good and I would like to know the answers to those too.
Another question that comes to mind is Would Twitter consider merging with another important social media company?