Twitter Co-Founder Doesn't Care About Instagram Growth
Photo-sharing service Instagram, owned by Facebook, recently announced 300 million active users, overtaking Twitter which has 284 million active users. Everyone is pleasantly surprised but Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.
Speaking at an interview with Fortune, Williams said: ""It's a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about? The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No one ever talks about, 'What is a [monthly active user]?' I believe it's the case that if you use Facebook Connect - if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect - you're considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean? It's become so abstract to be meaningless. Something you did caused some data in their servers to be recorded for the month. So I think we're on the wrong path."
In the interview he added that Twitter's impact on the world is far more significant than Instagram where people come to see just pretty pictures.
"If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it's pretty significant. It's at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It's this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter-important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that's happening, I frankly don't give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures," Williams added.
Speaking of business in terms of money, he said Twitter is more profitable than Instagram. "Twitter makes a hell of a lot more money than Instagram, if that's what Wall Street cares about," he added.
