Related Articles
Forget the Facebook Phone, which remains a thing of myth, but how about a Twitter Phone? CEO Dick Costolo rubbished the idea in his keynote speech at Mobile World Congress yesterday, saying that he’d rather see more mobile manufacturers make Twitter a key feature in their handsets instead.
“I believe there is a need [to better integrate] Twitter in existing platforms for phones, but not for a Twitter-branded smart phone,” said Costolo, as reported by PaidContent. “What I would like are more single sign-on experiences, more apps that can tweet without having to go to another app.”
It looks like he’ll get his wish with Windows Phone 7, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said yesterday that an update to WP7 will bake Twitter into the software as tightly as Facebook. Costolo also pointed to Android users’ ability to take a photo and automatically tweet it as a step in the right direction.
Costolo also said Twitter wants tweeting to work the same no matter what device you’re on. “When I switch devices, the experience has to be the same,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to relearn Twitter.”
Twitter is already a mobile phenomenon though, even before these kinds of deals come into effect. According to Costolo, 40 per cent of all tweets are sent from mobile devices — which with 130 million tweets a day, is a huge number — and 50 per cent of active Twitter users tweet from more than one platform, such as from their PC and their mobile or tablet.
TV shows are one of the big things fuelling this, apparently. That won’t be news if you’ve watched X Factor or Take Me Out with a tweetstream functioning as an additional layer of commentary, but Costolo said Glee is also tweeting up a storm in the US.
“People have talked about interactive TV and the second screen experience forever,” he said in the keynote, according to Fierce Mobile Content. “The second screen is Twitter. People are watching TV in real time again. The DVR is being taken out of the equation.”
