Free is Twitter's watchword as it spreads wings

Dubai: Microblogging service Twitter will remain free, a top company official has assured.

San Fransisco-based Twitter is one of the most popular internet social networking services. The company allows its users to broadcast short, 140-character messages, or tweets, to a group of followers.

Twitter, which has gained huge popularity and has become an active communication tool for leaders, media outlets, businessmen and the general public, is here to stay, according to its vice-president Katie Jacobs Stanton.

Stanton said she does not see the "Twitter phenomenon" fading out any soon, especially with 375,000 users being added every day and 65 per cent of the traffic coming from outside the United States.

She said Twitter, which is four years old, currently has 175 million users worldwide and is available in six languages, namely English, Japanese, Italian, German, French and Spanish.

"At Twitter, we are working to broaden coverage in the Middle East and we think it is an important market. We might also have Arabic as a language in 2011, but we are not yet sure of the exact timeframe," Stanton said.

Revenue model

She also denied that Twitter will become a paid service.

"We do not have plans to make it a paid service. We get our revenues from advertisments which appear in certain parts on Twitter.com," Stanton said.

She also reviewed the eight operating principles of Twitter.

"We seek to be a force for good, as was the case during Haiti earthquake as Twitter played a big role in getting people together to raise funds," she said.

Twitter's other principles include making things happen, paying attention, removing friction, taking an artful approach, building a culture of trust, seeking the truth and thinking bigger.

"We believe open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. We also believe Twitter is changing the way governments communicate," she said.

According to her, over 40 world leaders are using Twitter to communicate with each other, their own people and the world at large. Those leaders include presidents, prime ministers and secretaries of state among others.

Stanton also pointed out that Twitter is different from Facebook as it is more of an information network, while the latter is more of a social network.

The Twitter international office is located in San Francisco. The relatively small floor accommodates 300 employees in close proximity to each other without barriers. All the employees ride bicycles to the office, whose doors carry names of various birds in keeping with the Twitter theme.

New-media specialist

Twitter vice-president Katie Jacobs Stanton was a former Google veteran who took White House and State Department jobs in the Obama administration. She worked six years for Google and three years for Yahoo before joining Twitter in July this year.

Stanton worked on new-media strategies for President Obama's 2008 campaign, served as White House director of citizen participation and in December began helping the State Department use social media in international diplomacy and aid. She also assisted in preparing the speech Obama gave in Cairo on June 4, 2009.