Twitter co-founder Biz Stone sat down for an interview with Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report” Thursday night. Aside from discussing the humor of his name (“I assume that ‘Biz’ in ‘Biz Stone’ does not stand for ‘business model,’” Colbert quips), Stone talks about Twitter’s plans to hold its own ground and eventually turn a profit.

Perhaps most notably, given today’s rumor-driven storm of buyout talk, Stone tells Colbert: “We’re going to become a strong, profitable, independent company.” He goes on to say that his team plans to “start experimenting” with revenue models this year. (See: “Twitter Pro Accounts Coming This Year.”)

Here’s the full video:

Biz Stone Talks Twitter With Stephen Colbert is a post from: The Inquisitr

Twitter’s @ Reply Change

First, the @ replies: Rather than including only tweets that begin with @your_username, as had happened in the past, the system will now include all tweets that include @your_username anywhere within the message.

“The @Replies feature was introduced because we noticed lots of folks putting the @ symbol in front of Twitter usernames as a way of addressing one another,” Stone explains.

“However, folks started getting more inventive as they often do. Now people include @username mentions in the middle of tweets as a way to simply reference another account,” he goes on. “Today’s update better reflects how folks are using Twitter now.”

The section will now be listed as @your_username (with your own username following the @, to be clear) within your Twitter home page.

Design Discussions

Meanwhile, Twitter has hired a new creative director to look at the site’s design and possible changes, according to the folks over at Creative Capital. Former Google Visual Design Lead Douglas Bowman is joining the team, Creative Capital reports, taking Stone’s place as acting creative director.

“The Twitter Web page looks pretty simple,” the site quotes Stone as saying. “But from our perspective, the design needs a lot of work.”

Bowman publicly announced his departure from Google earlier this month, saying it was time for him to “move on.”

“I’ve grown tired of debating … minuscule design decisions,” he wrote in a posting on his personal blog. “There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.”

Bowman indicated that he did have something else lined up, though he didn’t go into detail at the time.

“When I joined [Google], I thought there was potential to help the company change course in its design direction. But I learned that Google had set its course long before I arrived. Google was a massive aircraft carrier, and I was just a small dinghy trying to push it a few degrees north,” he said.

Twitter Tweaks @ Replies, Eyes New Site Design is a post from: The Inquisitr

News broke yesterday that traffic on Twitter is up 422% in the last 12 months, despite a year that introduced the fail whale into popular culture, and where service outages on other sites were routinely assessed as not being bad compared to Twitter.

Twitter should be the startup that has failed. The management of the company has been at very best grossly incompetent. Twitter was sold as a social utility, but it regularly failed to deliver, driving a new wave of microblogging services that aimed to take over where Twitter failed. For Twitter users, the question for a time wasn’t whether Twitter was down, but if it was up.

And yet, Twitter continues to thrive, even if it still seemingly doesn’t have a business plan, and any source of revenue.

While CEO Jack Dorsey deserves much of the credit, the two other founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams lay claim to much of the blame. Both worked with each other at Pyra Labs, and used that knowledge to build Twitter as a CMS platform, instead of a messaging service. And yet, who can dispute the numbers: Twitter has not only survived its darkest hour, a time where any other startup would have failed, Twitter has thrived.

Twitter has defied logic from the start, and that it thrives today defies logic again. Although I’m not religious, there can only be one conclusion: Evan Williams and Biz Stone are blessed. If anyone has a more logical conclusion, feel free to leave a comment

(img credit Mai Le)

Lets face it, Evan Williams and Biz Stone are blessed is a post from: The Inquisitr