From a news perspective I think the dolphin in the Gowanus canal captured NBCNewYork and even the behind the scenes Vines BuzzFeed and Cosmo did show there's a real application for news there.
It's new so we'll see how people use it!
The cool thing about Twitter is that its filled with people from a variety of backgrounds who are constantly thinking about ways to improve the service. It's hard to say where Twitter will be 5 years from now and the company itself is only 7 years old but I think that's the magic of it.... nobody knows.
When Twitter rolls out new features it tends to do them in batches of users so 10% of users, 25%, 50%, etc. so that's what's happening right now. I don't have a timeline for you but trust it's on the way!
Twitter is well known as a great place to work. If you were asked to recommend one thing Twitter does for its employees to news organizations, what would it be?
Twitter is a little bit like working at Disneyland but instead of Minnie and Mickey you've got some of the smartest people you'll ever meet in your life. The atmosphere is fun and fantastic but also very open and innovative in a way that I've never experienced at any newsroom I've worked in.
The fact that twitter actively soliciting ideas from all levels of employees and is transparent about the direction the company is headed in makes people love the company even more. i know from past experiences that journalism organizations could take some of that energy and openness to make employees feel more invested in the company they work for.
On that note -- What’s it like to meet with so many different journalists in newsrooms across the country? What’s the most unusual newsroom experience you’ve had so far?
Meeting a lot of different newsrooms excites me because of every step I'm learning something new... no two newsrooms are the same. It reminds me of when I was a kid and I read the Encyclopedia Brown books. All of them had the same theme but each one was different.
So I take the information and feedback that i get and turn that around either internally to improve on the existing platform and experience and also to other newsrooms so they can challenge themselves to do better.
Not so much unusual but visiting BuzzFeed's offices in NYC really blew my mind. LOL and OMG stickers everywhere, bright lights, big conference rooms and Big Ang from Mob Wives and a puppy we're downstairs waiting to come up.
But beyond that a newsroom full of young and talented people with their pulse on the internet and really great understanding of how modern digital news works.
AUTO TWEET IS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN DO AS A JOURNALIST.
Imagine if I autotweeted this chat... you'd be bored out of your mind and you wouldn't stick around would you? Same goes for Twitter. People want to connect with real human beings, not robots. That's what makes social media social.
Often when people and specifically journalists think about twitter they think they have to be on the site all the time. I say you don't have to tweet every minute of your life... tweet about the moments that excite you or interest you.
So if you in the past would have called a colleague or friend and said "Hey did you see this..." you can do the same on Twitter.
And you don't even have to tweet to reap some of the benefits from Twitter. Following the right people who you are interested in and just listening is how a huge chunk of people actually use Twitter.
One of the parts of Twitter, the company, that fascinates me is how small it is still, yet how much of a global presence it has. Is that as tough to balance as it looks from the outside?
It's interesting because you want to go out there and help everyone in the world understand the magic of Twitter and how they can use it better but because we are a still growing company we can't do that for everyone on the planet.
We're almost out of time, but I do have one last question for you... Out of Twitter's 140 million daily active users, who's your favorite to follow?
My favorite accounts to follow on Twitter: @ShawnaNBCNews, @papermagazine, @yo_thanland, @RuPaul and, as you've probably guessed from this convo @BuzzFeed. Lots of folks with unique points of view and/or big personalities.
Mark, thanks for joining us this afternoon. It's easy to see how you've gone so far in such a relatively short amount of time. Best of luck with everything!
From a news perspective I think the dolphin in the Gowanus canal captured NBCNewYork and even the behind the scenes Vines BuzzFeed and Cosmo did show there's a real application for news there.
Does Twitter have plans for developing other storytelling tools itself? And, where do you see Twitter five years from now?
When could we expect to see Twitter archiving rolled out to everyone?
Twitter is well known as a great place to work. If you were asked to recommend one thing Twitter does for its employees to news organizations, what would it be?
what's the best way to auto Tweet? I use twitterfeed . . . but, it's pretty buggy
Amazingly, there are still journalists who have been slow to adopt all these new tools that can help them with their storytelling. What advice would you give them to make them more comfortable doing it?