John showing off his Twitter account, where he was crowdsourcing his CM Summit interview questions for Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

John Battelle: Twitter’s Quantcast graph shows 2 million uniques, Compete shows 3 million US uniques, Comscore tells us you have 1.5 million. What do you look at?

Evan Williams: We look at Google Analytics. People don’t necessarily compose on twitter.com. So we only see 50% of users directly. The rest are in SMS, desktop clients, etc.

John: Is this deja vu? Of Blogger? For everyone here, what is Twitter?

Evan: Social communication tool, status updates, framed around “What are you doing?”

John: Why do marketers care?

Evan: One-to-many in real time. IM/SMS is one-to-one. Fastest way to get a message to a lot of people. Unlike broadcast, it’s two-way. Search. Re: social networks, it’s not about friends. People are just opting into diff information sources. Don’t have to say “Dell is my friend”

John: Might you charge people for using Twitter?

Evan: Yeah. We’re still figuring that out. We’re still focusing on growth. Might need to charge for identity verification.

John: Is Twitter becoming a publisher? e.g. Election 2008

Evan: Purchased Summize to reveal things you didn’t know

John: Are you concerned about 3rd parties making money off Twitter?

Evan: I’m happy for them. It’s a win-win.

John: People say Google bought blogger because it was “virgin powder for AdSense”

Evan: That’s not true

John: Strikes me that there’s an AdWords opportunity there, when brands are mentioned, Tweetsense?

Evan: Can I use that?

John: Why not put up AdSense?

Evan: It doesn’t excite me as much as other things. I want to focus on things that are more organic. Twitter is more about opting into information. e.g. sponsored tweets

John: Search?

Evan: We haven’t done search because of infrastructure.

John: I can’t imagine my mother using the twitter grammar (hashes, etc)

Evan: At the top of my priority list. All sorts of things are broken with the user experience. Search for “I don’t get it.” But they’re not integral to using Twitter—basically user hacks. There’s no benefit to Twitter if you sign up and don’t know who to follow. We need to immediately deliver value. Bring search to the front.

John: What’s the base demographic of the Twitterverse?

Evan: We don’t know. We know location based on IP. Survey 55% Female. Older average audience than Facebook. Used to be early adopter male geeks. 50% is US.

Question: News alert specific features?

Evan: Twitter is faster than other mediums, bottoms up. Talking to a lot of news orgs, e.g. CNN. Ten words at the bottom of Twitter search (John: Twitter-zeitgeist) summarize what people are searching for.

Question: Most close friends don’t follow me back on Twitter? Connections to Facebook?

Evan: Facebook’s API allows us to write statuses, but not get them out.

John: Is Facebook’s “What are you doing now?” an homage to Twitter?

Evan: Completely coincidental.

Question: Would you make extended features available for money?

Evan: I don’t like the idea of a premium account. It’s a burden to support.

Question: how do you approach usefulness vs. making money, re: marketing?

Evan: I’d be in line with John, re: conversation. The relationship will create value over time. Marketer came to us with an ad buy, we convinced them to create an account, which you can use forever.

John: It’s hard for marketers to maintain that relationship over time

Evan: The campaign-mentality doesn’t work on Twitter. You can’t buy space, you have to build followers over time.