BARCELONA, Spain — Twitter is making money and must become even simpler and more unified across platforms in the future, chief executive Dick Costolo told the audience at Mobile World Congress on Monday.
Twitter is a so-called micro- blogging platform that allows registered users to send posts of up to 140 characters to their “followers.” It is available on desktops and also on most mobile phones, including very basic ones, where it appears as text messages. About 60 percent of users tweet from desktops and the rest from mobile devices.
Costolo said in his keynote presentation at the world’s largest telecommunications event that he wants Twitter to look the same across devices so that consumers don’t need to relearn how to use it if they switch from an Android phone to a BlackBerry, for instance.
“Users shouldn’t have to think about how to use Twitter,” he said.
For Twitter to become even more intuitive, Costolo called for deeper integration within software platforms in the latest smartphones. In practice, that means users with some of the latest models can tweet a photo by hitting a single dedicated button rather than needing to exit the camera mode, launch the Twitter application and go through various other steps to share the image.
Once again, Costolo didn’t fully answer questions about the company’s business model and its ability to monetize its fast-growing popularity.
“Every time I have an interview, I am asked when we’re going to make money,” he said. “The short answer is we’re already making money.”
He also hinted at greater financial rewards on the horizon.
“We believe that when you provide value to your users, that value will be returned to you multifold in ways you can’t imagine,” he said.
But, he provided no real details on plans to monetize Twitter.
Costolo pointed to several ways in which Twitter is already useful to companies that understand it, helping them run advertising campaigns or better serve their customers. Airline Virgin Atlantic, during a recent snowstorm in the U.S., re-issued tickets to passengers who requested changes via Twitter even as phone lines were busy.
