An easter egg in our ticketing system at work (on a pretty funny ticket):

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.

It’s been almost two months. I’ve been walking to work almost every day. It’s nice to integrate a little exercise into my daily routine. It’s actually a remarkably direct route. I walk all the way down Pine Street to Market, then I walk two blocks up Market to Spear, and then I walk three and a half super blocks to our building.

Google Maps says it’s 1.6 miles, which takes me just under 30 minutes. So that’s good: like an hour of exercise a day. Interesting to know I’m walking 18 minute miles. And there are really only two blocks of steep hills on Pine, between Kearny and Stockton. Otherwise it’s gradual if not flat.

I walk past all manner of useful things now. Mailboxes for instance. Helpful for mailing stuff. The other week I ran out of tea, and I didn’t have to make a special trip to pick some up. I just stopped in at one of the many markets on the way. Last week I totally got a HAIRCUT on the way into work. All old school, the way I like (but $26 more than a Stephanie-cut).

I ride an elevator all the time now. It’s the only way to get to the seventh floor of our building. Up to work. Down to lunch. Up to work. Sometimes down for snack break. Up to work. Down to head home. That’s a lot of elevator riding. And there’s a friggin’ LCD TV in the elevator, playing some infotainment channel called “Captivate.” Get it?

In the central courtyard of our building/block there are three different places to get food, a cafe that makes a tasty egg and cheese bagel, a place called “Bur-Eat-Os” that makes a decent quesadilla, and a newsstand with drinks and snacks to take away. (Oh yeah, and a Starbucks.) After two years in Sausalito without access to any Mexican food, now we’ve got a burrito place in our building. It blows my mind. And the prices! You’d think we’d be paying a king’s ransom to eat lunch in San Francisco, but it’s just the opposite. In Sausalito we were paying the tourist tax, but in downtown San Francisco, it’s amazing how much you can find for five bucks. And you can have the moon for seven.

I work more now, which is an unexpected change. Since I no longer have an eight mile scooter ride back home, since I no longer have to make the bridge before 6 (to cross for free), I end up staying at the office later more often than not. I’m glad that I’m liking what I’m working on, but it’s good to have a healthy life-work balance. So I’m trying to be more disciplined about closing up shop around 6.

Yesterday I found myself sitting on the floor of a small room backstage at The Independent, recording an interview with one of my favorite bands.

I’m not even sure how it came to be that I was sitting there in that room on that day, except that Federated Media has been building this big “live media-cum-social media” event/website called Crowdfire for the Outside Lands Music Festival this weekend. As part of that, a bunch of folks (FM employees and FM bloggers) have been tasked with interviewing some of the musicians who are taking part. Somehow Leona got in touch with the Two Gallants, mentioned this to me off-hand one day, and seemed all too happy to have me along as her cameraman.

And so it was that I collected all my lo-fi camera gear—video recording them with my old Canon Digital Elph, and audio recording them with my Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. I enlisted Andy as our video editor, who spent most of the day splicing the video and audio and then editing it down into YouTube-able segments. The interview hasn’t been uploaded for public consumption yet, but when it has, I’ll be sure to post it here.

In the meantime, I did record a few minutes of the Two Gallants sound check before the interview, which I posted to White Noise Lounge earlier this morning.

Third in a series of stellar views at FM (exhibit A and B).

Like Andre says, all this can be yours and more, if “you know, join us”.