Co-founder of Twitter Biz Stone is in Israel for the first time to speak at a conference being held on Tuesday night by the College of Management Academic Studies. The networking conference, intended for the college's alumni, will focus on the topic of social networking sites.
Despite being a leader among social sites with over 40 million registered users, Twitter does not charge a membership fee and remains free of advertising.
"2010 I think will be the year we start focusing a little more on revenue," Stone said at a press conference in Tel Aviv the morning before the conference. "We still have a lot of product work to do."
Unlike other major Web sites like Wikipedia and Facebook, Twitter does not have a Hebrew option for Israeli users. They launched a Japanese version of Twitter early on, and are now working on French, Italian, German, and Spanish versions of the Web site. If those Web sites come out well, then they will start working on a Hebrew Twitter.
One of the advantages of Twitter is the ease of login from other Web sites and applications. It is possible to Tweet, meaning update a Twitter status, from an application on iPhone or within a message page on the beta version of Google Wave.
"We want to partner with as many other companies, websites, and applications as we possibly can," said Stone. "We see it (Twitter) as water finding its way through different tributaries."
Just a month ago, Israeli audiences also heard from the heads of Wikipedia and Skype at the Presidential Conference in a panel about new media. At the networking conference on Tuesday, Stone was slated to speak about the relationship between new social media and business.
"Twitter is about finding out what's happening with the things, the people, the events that you care about right now," said Stone about the main purpose of the website. "It's proven to be many things to many people which is excellent."
