Twitter Names Jack Dorsey CEO, Adam Bain Becomes COO, Dick Costolo Steps Down From Board

After four months of running under Jack Dorsey interim chief executive, today Twitter finally named him as its permanent leader. The man who helped co-found Twitter in 2006 is now its full-time CEO again.

In addition to the new permanent role for Dorsey, Adam Bain is becoming COO — Bain used to handle revenue and partnerships at Twitter and was another CEO candidate. Dorsey also announced that a new board is in the works. The company already announced that Dick Costolo stepped down from the board. Dorsey will continue to serve as a board member but no longer as chairman.

“There are currently no plans to provide Mr. Dorsey with direct compensation for his role as Chief Executive Officer,” Twitter writes in the SEC document announcing the changes.

In an investor call, Twitter executives announced the changes and answered questions. “It’s our goal to exceed the expectations the world has for us,” Dorsey said. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“I’ve worked in partnership with Jack since I joined Twitter in 2010,” Bain said. He also said that he’s met with Dorsey over the years to talk about business, product and overall strategy. He also commented on the last four months as Dorsey has been temporary CEO for quite a while now.

“He’s got the senior staff working better than ever,” he said. “He’s also led the team for a product re-envisioning and product roadmap for 2016.” Naturally, the conversation shifted toward this mysterious product roadmap.

When asked about it, Dorsey alluded to project lightning, Twitter’s plan to show relevant live content to casual users.

“We’ve been reviewing our roadmap to make sure that we make Twitter easier to everyone around the world,” he said. “There’s a lot of initiatives aimed at making sure that people can immediately get value out of Twitter.”

At the same time, Dorsey reassured existing Twitter users, saying that the company is also building new tools to let power users do more things. “We’ve been playing with [Lightning] internally for quite some time and it feels… amazing,” Dorsey said.

Dorsey is juggling the job with a couple of other roles. In addition to already being the social network’s chairman of the board, he is also the CEO of Square, a payment processing company that he co-founded in 2009 and is reportedly slated for a public offering sometime this year. Insiders at Square have been quietly assuring everyone that Dorsey plans to stick around as CEO.

When it comes to splitting his time between Square, Dorsey dodged the question during the investor call.

An End To Many Speculations

After a Re/code article was published citing sources saying that Dorsey’s new permanent job was imminent, Twitter’s stock popped a few percentage points followed by a sharp decline and another rise.

Throughout his interim CEO period, Dorsey has remained committed to leading Square, as well. But the fact that Dorsey was already running another company when he took over as interim CEO of Twitter from Dick Costolo may have been one of the sticking points when considering him for the job long-term: Chris Sacca, a vocal Twitter investor,claims that a Twitter board member was one of the people who took issue with Dorsey doing both jobs simultaneously.

Some may have believed that the CEO role would always go to Dorsey, but more widely the move brings to an end one of the more-speculated leadership vacancies in the tech industry. Other names that we had heard floated for the job included insiders Adam Bain (head of revenue and partnerships and now COO) and CFO Anthony Noto; Jeff Weiner from LinkedIn; Bradley Horowtiz from Google and Padmasree Warrior.

We may now have a name to engrave on the back of the chair at the top of the table, but it doesn’t make that seat any less hot.

Twitter’s stock has been on a roller coaster, with the company weathering questions about its user growth and engagement, leadership changes, and more existentially what it is as a product. That’s led many to debate whether the company, with its stock in a dip, would simply get snapped up by a bigger fish like Google.

In that regard, you can see how someone leading Twitter who has been connected to it and its bigger vision from the start could make a lot of sense. Now the question will be how Dorsey implements that legacy advantage.

Over 1 Million Sign-Ins within First 10 Days of Periscope Opened

Twitter today gave the first official news about the growth of its live-streaming video acquisition Periscope, with CEO Dick Costolo saying more than 1 million people signed in to the app in the first 10 days after its official launch on March 26. The public is closely watching Periscope’s growth, as it’s in a heated battle with independent competitor Meerkat for the mobile live-streaming market. Costolo said “we have seen tremendous early growth” in Periscope.

And that’s only on iOS. Periscope has yet to launch on Android, but Twitter investor Chris Sacca today previewed a version of Periscope for Google’s mobile OS during a Periscoped interview with the product’s CEO Kayvon Beykpour. The two revealed that Periscope’s web viewers will also get the ability to comment on streams today.

Periscope is now at No. 167 in the US-Overall iOS chart and No. 22 in US-Social Networking, according to App Annie. For comparison, Meerkat appears to have fallen out of the top 1,000 U.S. apps, and is at No. 129 in the US-Social Networking chart.

Costolo took time to specifically discuss video today during Twitter’s Q1 2015 earnings call. He also mentioned Twitter’s native video products and its acquisition of Niche [disclosure: My cousin is one of Niche’s founders], which connects Vine and other social media stars to brands so they can get paid for creating sponsored content.

CFO Anthony Noto mentioned that “Since the launch of native video on the platform on iOS and Android, we’ve seen orders of magnitude increases in the volume of video shared to Twitter. That content is some of the most engaging on the platform.”

Costolo also said that Twitter has the potential to push video to logged out users and syndication as well as people who use its apps, noting “I’m super excited and confident in the ability to grow the Periscope user base.”

If Twitter is a way to instantly know what someone’s thinking, Periscope instantly shows you what they’re seeing. Whether it’s for news, celebrities connecting with fans, or simply interesting content, all of Twitter’s top styles of tweets would be even more vivid with live-streamed video.I hear Costolo has been even more enthusiastic about video. Sources tell me that he has been telling new employees during orientation that “video is the future of Twitter.” That’s similar to how we heard Costolo pitched the acquisition to Periscope’s founders. The more organic video content Twitter can get on its platform, the more highly lucrative video ads it can insert without users getting mad.

Over 1 Million Sign-Ins within First 10 Days of Periscope Opened

Twitter today gave the first official news about the growth of its live-streaming video acquisition Periscope, with CEO Dick Costolo saying more than 1 million people signed in to the app in the first 10 days after its official launch on March 26. The public is closely watching Periscope’s growth, as it’s in a heated battle with independent competitor Meerkat for the mobile live-streaming market. Costolo said “we have seen tremendous early growth” in Periscope.

And that’s only on iOS. Periscope has yet to launch on Android, but Twitter investor Chris Sacca today previewed a version of Periscope for Google’s mobile OS during a Periscoped interview with the product’s CEO Kayvon Beykpour. The two revealed that Periscope’s web viewers will also get the ability to comment on streams today.

Periscope is now at No. 167 in the US-Overall iOS chart and No. 22 in US-Social Networking, according to App Annie. For comparison, Meerkat appears to have fallen out of the top 1,000 U.S. apps, and is at No. 129 in the US-Social Networking chart.

Costolo took time to specifically discuss video today during Twitter’s Q1 2015 earnings call. He also mentioned Twitter’s native video products and its acquisition of Niche [disclosure: My cousin is one of Niche’s founders], which connects Vine and other social media stars to brands so they can get paid for creating sponsored content.

CFO Anthony Noto mentioned that “Since the launch of native video on the platform on iOS and Android, we’ve seen orders of magnitude increases in the volume of video shared to Twitter. That content is some of the most engaging on the platform.”

Costolo also said that Twitter has the potential to push video to logged out users and syndication as well as people who use its apps, noting “I’m super excited and confident in the ability to grow the Periscope user base.”

If Twitter is a way to instantly know what someone’s thinking, Periscope instantly shows you what they’re seeing. Whether it’s for news, celebrities connecting with fans, or simply interesting content, all of Twitter’s top styles of tweets would be even more vivid with live-streamed video.I hear Costolo has been even more enthusiastic about video. Sources tell me that he has been telling new employees during orientation that “video is the future of Twitter.” That’s similar to how we heard Costolo pitched the acquisition to Periscope’s founders. The more organic video content Twitter can get on its platform, the more highly lucrative video ads it can insert without users getting mad.

Twitter’s New Dedicated Food Account Could Help Broaden Appeal

Twitter is launching @TwitterFood today, a dedicated account that sifts through the myriad food-related tweets shared on the social network and offers up a curated selection of hand-picked missives from heavyweights in the field, including Martha Stewart and Alton Brown, as well as choice posts from the general public.

The Twitter Food account is a smart idea for a company looking to expand its appeal in order to find a new, more general audience. While the network has a strong cadre of die-hard users, it’s still struggling to gain a foothold in the broader market the way Facebook has managed to do.

Food isn’t the company’s first curated feed; Twitter Music and Twitter Sports operate in much the same way, for instance. But focusing on areas of high engagement that’s more likely to appeal to user groups beyond news hounds and real-time information junkies is a wise decision.

Onboarding remains one of the biggest challenges facing Twitter in terms of growth; curated feeds like Twitter Food offer one-stop shopping for new users, giving them a smattering of high-quality content relevant to their needs from which they can branch out and find new follows to fill their timeline.

 The financial picture painted by Twitter’s earnings release yesterday isn’t all that rosy, and user growth was a key causal factor there, so anything that can contribute to growth is a worthwhile effort right now.It’s also a good way to avoid irritating faithful users of the service but keeping the basic mechanics (i.e. time-based timelines) in place while making it easier for new users to get beyond the initial “so what now?” feeling that can accompany signing up without any close friends to follow or clear intent in terms of why you joined.

Deep-Learning Company MetaMind Hires Twitter, Salesforce Veteran Ruslan Belkin

MetaMind has named Ruslan Belkin, formerly of Salesforce, Twitter and LinkedIn, as its new vice president of engineering.

The artificial intelligence startup launched late last year with $8 million from Khosla Ventures and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. The company applies deep learning of natural language and images to solve a range of business problems. Currently the platform can be used for analyzing medical images, as well as for solving financial, social and marketing problems.

“Basically artificial intelligence is something I’ve always wanted to do,” Belkin said. “The market for this is really exploding in terms of growth.”

Belkin left his role as vice president of engineering at Salesforce and RelateIQ for the new position. He said he had a positive experience at Salesforce, but the time was right to move to MetaMind.

“I really felt I could help MetaMind at this stage,” Belkin said. “The time is really right now, not two months from now.”

In addition to his experience at Salesforce, Belkin also served as Twitter’s vice president of engineering, search and content, and LinkedIn’s senior director of engineering, content and community products. The MetaMind team hopes he can use those experiences in his new role as they accelerate development of the company.

“The team is excited to benefit from Ruslan’s leadership and experience as we aim to accelerate new developments and adoption of our artificial intelligence platform,” said MetaMind co-founder Richard Socher. “Ruslan adds to our powerhouse team that already includes my co-founder Sven Strohband along with several Stanford PhDs with machine learning experience.”

Last fall at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Vinod Khosla predicted machine learning will have more impact than mobile in the next 20 years. Today he praised Belkin’s addition to the MetaMind team.

“We are excited to add the deep expertise of a hypergrowth veteran like Ruslan to MetaMind,” Khosla said.

Edgee Finds Space Between A Blog And A Tweet

Berlin-based startup edgee reckons it’s spotted a vacant space in the crowded social media parking lot for a new digital content format designed to sit between the expertise and effort of writing a blog post, and the brevity and flightiness of a tweet.

In a nutshell, the platform (web-only for now but with mobile apps in the works) lets people choose, order and annotate multimedia collages of others’ content, to create themed displays on topics of their choice. For instance, one user has made an edgee entitled Combating the Surveillance State — which links to a Ted Talk by Edward Snowden, books by Alan Moore and Glen Greenwald, articles on anti-surveillance face camouflage and more, on one themed page.

Is there really demand for such a third way online content format? edgee evidently thinks so, arguing that its easy-to-use template tool for building embedded multimedia content collections (linking to the source material) lowers the barrier of entry to content creation by allowing users to remix digital media in highly customized ways, and without having to have high level topic expertise themselves. So basically it’s a content creation tool without the need to create original content.

“What we found out talking to a lot of consumers is that most of them do not create,” says co-founder Markus Maier, discussing the inspiration for edgee. “Many do not feel they have enough knowledge, have mastered the subject matter enough so that they can actually write a blog post.”

“I myself was frustrated. I felt like I wanted to create something online but I never had the time to create a blog. And I always thought Twitter was too reductionist. And then on top of that I’m interested in a lot of subject areas where if you write about it you have to have an incredible wealth of knowledge,” he adds, citing the European debt crisis as an example of an area he’s interested in but does not feel adequately equipped with expertise to blog directly about.

“I can make my own edgee about the European debt crisis without being a PhD. And I felt this idea of standing on the shoulders of other content creators enabling the layman to create something he can be proud of was a really interesting idea.”

On the surface the edgee concept might sound rather like Pinterest. With some overlap with the likes of Genius. Or Medium. Or Google+. Or ello. Or even Flipboard. Not so, saysMaier, arguing that edgee offers more control than Pinterest, more content types than Genius, more custom annotation than Flipboard, and flips the rules of Medium on its head — by having the majority of an edgee post not be original content, so requiring less expertise to create. edgees are basically others’ multimedia content — selected, arranged and captioned by the user, so it’s about remixing and repacking.

As for Google+ and ello, Maier says edgee is different because the format is distinct in that users create discrete units — in the same way that a Pinterest user creates different boards — whereas other social networks are about individual posts which are used to populate continuous, unordered social streams.

All of that may sound like subtle distinctions vs other UGC platforms but if edgee can get traction as a focused, content-discovery platform it could offer various interest-based communities a shortcut to content they care about — cutting out the leg work of Googling stuff themselves or filtering friends’ social streams. “Our long term goal is that once people have created enough interesting edgees, consumers actually come to edgee to explore,” adds Maier.

“I think we’re one of the first platforms that really tries to break down all the different verticals… Frankly I’ve never seen this type of diverse content in one place anywhere on the web and I think that’s the direction we should be going with our multimedia devices. Why would you only go to Netflix? Why would you only go to Wikipedia?”

And as for mainstream social networks — the Facebooks and Twitters of the digital world — Maier says edgee is looking to piggyback on those networks, rather than try to compete with them for audience eyeballs. So you can post your edgees to Facebook et al to spread their reach.

“We’re trying to stand on the shoulders of other networks,” he says. “We think an edgee is ideal for somebody who is passionate in a certain subject area to create something that feels… original and then you can spread it via Facebook, via Twitter, via email to their existing audience. So we’re not trying to create a new audience — maybe in the long term — but in the short term we are connected to all the existing social networks.”

edgee is officially launching out of beta today, and has signed up around 50,000 early users during an invite-only two month period. It’s also raised some €500,000 in angel funding so far, and is in the process of raising a Series A round for the next phase of growth.

It’s not hard to see where a (future) business model could take shape for edgee, assuming it can gain adequate traction. The rich media format would clearly lend itself well to dressing up branded content to look like it’s something interesting (aka native advertising). Ecommerce affiliate revenue could be another route to monetization.

Early edgee users have come the tech community, finding it via Product Hunt, but it’s since expanded to be picked up by the Berlin arts scene, according to Maier. He sees expansive use-cases for the platform — including in education, where it could be used to foster collaborative learning. A collaboration feature will be coming in the next few months to allow multiple users to contribute to a single edgee. “It’s one of the most requested features,” he says. “Especially teachers, especially professors. They want their students to chip in, and we’re working on that.”

Elsewhere, the repackaging element of edgees has apparently caught the eye of bloggers wanting to make more out of their existing content. “We even have a couple of travel bloggers that use edgee and just, I guess, repackage their whole travel into one edgee. So this meta level… is actually being used by bloggers,” says Maier. “They mix and match existing blog posts, add some of their favorite other bloggers, they create an expose about their whole travel. So in the travel space we’ve found some interesting traction as well.”

Twitter Now Lets You Opt In To Receive Direct Messages From Anyone

Twitter has for years tested a feature that would allow anyone to opt in to receiving direct messages from other users on its platform, even if the accounts weren’t following each other as per earlier requirements. This setting was rolled out more broadly to a portion of Twitter’s user base in 2013, but never became an option for the general public. That changes today, says Twitter, which announced this morning that now anyone on its network can opt to accept direct messages from any other Twitter user.

Previously, in order to receive a direct message from another person, you would have to be following that user on Twitter. For some public figures, and especially for journalists, that restriction made it difficult to communicate more privately. For reporters, it could also potentially tip people off about one’s sources, since users would have to engage in public tweets asking to get a follow back so they could send that direct message in the first place.

In the past, Twitter users including brands and some Verified Users have been able to, in some cases, enable a setting that would open up their Direct Message inbox to anyone. But now any Twitter user can turn this option on for themselves, if they choose. (Twitter says the feature is rolling out now – so if you don’t yet see it in your Settings, just check back in a bit.)

Related to this change, the company is also updating its messaging rules so you can reply to incoming DM’s regardless of whether or not that person follows you in return.

And to better highlight the newly added option, Twitter says that a new Direct Message button will appear on profile pages on both Android and iPhone. This button will only appear on the profiles of people you can send Direct Messages to, making it more obvious with a glance who’s turned the feature on already.

Finally, if someone who has the “Receive Direct Messages from anyone setting” switched on begins to receive spam or abuse, they can still block the abuser on Twitter in order to stop that account from being able to DM them.

The updates come a time when Twitter has been focusing heavily on improving the Direct Messaging for its users, in light of a shift in the mobile application ecosystem which sees private communication apps like Snapchat and WhatsApp significantly growing their respective user bases and increasing their users’ engagement. Snapchat reportedly has some 200 million monthly users. WhatsApp recently announced 800 million users. Twitter, however, has 288 million monthly actives.

The company may be hoping that by improving its private messaging functionality, it can grow the number of users who register for accounts as opposed to those who more passively use its service only to view tweets. In recent months, Twitter has rolled out a number of changes to DM’s, including support for group DM’s and the ability to share public tweets via DM’s, for instance.

As to why Twitter has made the decision to finally introduce this setting more publicly after all these years, another answer may have been hinted at in the company blog post, it seems. Here, Twitter offers an example of how this feature could be used by businesses, noting that if users wanted to tweet feedback to a local ice cream shop, they would first have to ask the shop to follow them. Now that business could simply adjust a setting in order to hear from all their customers – even if those customers didn’t want to be publicly tweeting about their thoughts and opinions.

We had previously heard that this use case for brands and businesses was something Twitter wanted to focus on in the near future, as it would allow users and brands to communicate directly and privately without the hassle of the following request. This is important because many businesses use Twitter for customer support, and that can sometimes require the exchange of personal and private information, including financial info, which, for obvious reasons, needs to take place over DMs.

Twitter Is Winning The Live Streaming Battle

Following its acquisition of live streaming app Periscope, Twitter has been actively fighting to make sure its service beats that of independent competitor Meerkat, which had a slightly earlier start. In recent weeks, Twitter has made changes to cut off Meerkat’s access to Twitter’s social graph, and even began pushing celebrities and publishers to stop using Meerkat. Those efforts appear to be paying off for Twitter, according to new data out now, which shows Periscope leading Meerkat by nearly half a percentage point in terms of monthly active users on iOS.

The rival services, which both offer apps that allow users to broadcast live from their smartphone directly to Twitter, have been battling for consumers’ attention while quickly rolling out improvements to their respective apps. Last month, for example,Meerkat introduced new discovery features and recommendations, while Periscope’s more recent update made it easier to find broadcasts from friends.

And just today, Meerkat has one-upped Twitter again by being first out of the gate with an Android app, though access is still invite-only at this point.

Twitter, however, still has the advantage as it controls the platform and, as a larger, publicly traded company, already has the resources to court the celebrities, media companies and others who could help make its platform a success. Plus, if need be, it could even strong-arm customers and other brands into using Periscope by cutting off their access to ad products like Amplify if they chose to work with Meerkat instead.

And of course Twitter also has vastly more resources to throw at Periscope, from an engineering, marketing, and recruiting perspective.

Now it appears that Twitter’s aggressive tactics have been working. Periscope overtook Meerkat in terms of monthly active users during the week of March 22nd. At that point, Meerkat had a 0.2% reach on iOS and Periscope had a 0.3% reach, according to data from 7Park. “Reach,” in this case, is defined as the monthly active users the app has, as a percentage of millions of iOS users in the U.S. between March and April 2015.

The following week, the gap between the two apps widened, as Meerkat’s reach slipped to 0.1% and Periscope climbed up to 0.5%.

However, it’s worth pointing out that in the grand scheme of things, these numbers are still low. The two services are battling over a very small audience, compared with other social applications. For comparison’s sake, Twitter reaches around 19% of U.S. iOS users while its Vine video app reaches 5.4%. And Snapchat tops them all with a 29.8% reach.

That being said, growing to even half a percentage point in a matter of weeks is a strong launch for a new app, and it’s likely that Periscope will continue to grow in the months ahead, especially with Twitter’s full efforts behind it.

With mobile social apps, many believe it doesn’t have to be a winner-take-all market. But that’s not the case with Twitter’s Periscope. Video is expected to be a major part of Twitter’s future, and its own live streaming platform has the potential to be a lucrative source of new ad revenue as well. In addition, the service gives users a new way to engage with Twitter – something that could help the network increase its active user numbers, time spent using its apps, and the number of logged-in users.

That latter item could address a long-term pain point for the company. Twitter historically has had trouble getting new visitors to convert to registered users, as many use the service more passively only to read tweets from news media or public figures like politicians, celebs, sports figures, and other influencers. Just yesterday, in fact, Twitter rolled out a new home page designed to cater to those who don’t have a Twitter account yet or who aren’t signed in. The updated landing page lets these logged out users view top tweets by category – giving them a way to interact with the service before setting up an account.

The hope, on Twitter’s part, is that these visitors like what they see on the new site well enough to actually join the service. And the new page also gives Twitter a way to better track its visitors who aren’t registered users. Of course, it’s easy to imagine how a section focused on popular live video streams could make its way to this page in the future, too.

For Meerkat, going up against Twitter may end up being a lost cause – but the app’s early popularity and the technical chops of its team could make it an acquisition target for other major players who want to participate in the live streaming trend, like Facebook perhaps. What is clear is that in Meerkat’s battle with Twitter, it’s still got a big fight ahead.

Twitter Makes It Easier For Developers To Add Timelines To Mobile Apps

Twitter this week rolled out new features to its mobile developer platform, Fabric, aimed at expanding access to Twitter timelines from third-party applications. With an update to Twitter Kit, the platform component that lets developers authenticate users via Twitter and showcase tweet embeds within apps, developers are now also able to integrate Twitter timelines within their iOS or Android applications with just a few lines of code.

Previously, Twitter Kit only allowed for embedding tweets in mobile apps, and styling them to match up with the app’s theme. But with support for Twitter timelines, app developers are able to show entire timelines in their app with minimal effort. This includes the ability to show a user timeline – that is, a timeline from a single Twitter account – as well as search timelines. This latter option allows an app developer to display search results based on key terms that are relevant to the app experience,explains Twitter.

As with Tweet embeds, the timelines can be customized to blend in the with the app’s theme by adjusting the background colors and even the color of the text itself.

Transportation app Citymapper is one of the first to use the Twitter user timelines integration, which allows it to keep it customers informed about public transportation status updates and delays. Meanwhile, Regal Cinemas is using the search timelines integration to include relevant movie reviews in its application.

Related to this feature, Twitter Kit also now includes “guest authentication,” which is what makes these timelines accessible to anyone – not just those who have logged in with Twitter. This addition allows an app to access the necessary content from the Twitter API without needing a user context, says Twitter.

While these updates are aimed at developers, they’re a part of Twitter’s larger agenda to more deeply integrate its service on mobile devices by way of third-party apps.

With Fabric, the idea is that Twitter gains the ability to reach more users than it could by way of its own native applications alone – like Twitter, Vine and Periscope. Instead, mobile consumers would end up accessing and using Twitter by way of other apps – even if they never established an account on Twitter.com itself.

Some features in Fabric, like Twitter Kit or the Crashlytics bug detection and crash reporting solution, are designed to make developers’ lives a little easier. But they co-exist alongside other features that impact Twitter’s bottom line, like MoPub, which lets developers introduce ads into their apps with just a few clicks. (And Twitter gets a cut of that revenue).

Of course, for Fabric to be successful, Twitter has to convince developers its worthwhile – and that’s something that Twitter may struggle with. The company has a history of alienating its developer community, shutting off access to its API and feature set overthe years, and killing a number of businesses along the way. Most recently, it pulled the rug out from under former Twitter firehose partner DataSift, whose social data platform has now fallen victim to Twitter’s decision to move into the space where it operates.

The fallout from moves like these is that developers today can sometimes view Twitter as a capricious platform provider whose offerings today could easily disappear tomorrow. That may have them seeking alternative ways to enhance their apps with social features, or put them off from using any of the other options Twitter Fabric provides.

Twitter Redesigns Homepage to Lure More Users

Twitter has redesigned its home page to encourage non-users to try the service.

 

Twitter Inc.

Twitter on Wednesday is giving its homepage a facelift to encourage visitors to try the service without logging in—possibly creating a new non-user audience that can still be served ads.

The new landing page will greet visitors with tiles of categories such as “Pop Artists,” “TV Shows & Stars,” “Business News,” and “Cute Animals,” a selection that reflects some of the best and most viral content on the platform. The idea of the new homepage is to bring a slice of those tweets to visitors instead of stonewalling them with the need to sign in.

According to a company blog post, after users click a topic, they will see a feed of tweets from popular accounts associated with that topic in real time. It’s almost as if they are logged in.

Until now, visitors who landed on Twitter.com only saw a brief welcome and a prompt to sign in, with the half a billion tweets sent each day swimming on the other side of the login page.

The homepage redesign comes after Twitter gave profile pages a facelift last year that highlighted images and gave users more creative authority. Twitter has said more than 200 million visitors come to Twitter profile pages each month.

The volume of visitors that have come to Twitter but then decide not to log in had been a conundrum for the company as it seeks to grow its user base beyond its 288 million users. Twitter has said that more than half a billion logged out users come to Twitter every month. Of those, over 125 million logged out users go directly to Twitter.com.

Now the company is working to capitalize on those masses in the hopes of serving them ads even if they aren’t full-fledged users. It plays into its grander strategy to build “the world’s largest daily audience” that doesn’t include just users in the traditional sense of the word but also groups like visitors who don’t sign in and those who see tweets in places other than Twitter itself.

The homepage redesign follows Twitter’s move last year to spiff up profile pages to highlight images and give users more creative authority. Twitter has said more than 200 million visitors come to Twitter profile pages each month.

Twitter said the new homepage will be rolled out first to U.S. desktop users.

Twitter Replaces ‘Discover’ Tool With Detailed Trending Topics

Twitter is rolling out a new feature for its mobile app that highlights trending topics along with a description for each.

Twitter Inc.

Twitter wants users to discover the best content. On Wednesday, the company said the namesake tool built to do just that is being retired.

In its place, the company is rolling out a new feature for its mobile app that highlights trending topics, part of Twitter’s ongoing effort to help users find timely and interesting tweets.

Going forward, trending topics — often in the form of hashtags — will appear on the app’s search page with brief descriptions appearing under each one to explain the meaning. That can be helpful as some hashtags are obscure. The new feature is similar to how Facebook includes a one-line description below trending items listed next to the news feed on the desktop version. Twitter said it may also show how many tweets have been sent related to each trend and whether it is gaining or losing traction.

The new mobile trends feature is launching in the U.S. in English for iOS and Android. The company says it is continuing to experiment with similar features for Twitter.com.

The Discover timeline — spearheaded by co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey in 2011 when he made a brief return to the company to redirect its product vision — was supposed to be an effortless way for users to find interesting content. The semi-tailored feature surfaced tweets from different accounts based on factors like who they followed and the accounts those people followed. The trending topics appeared at the top of the Discover timeline, usually as hashtags that at times were hard to understand or unclear why they’re trending. For instance, two top mobile trends on Wednesday are #BostonBombing and #WaystoEnjoyAGoodLife.

But some users complained the Discover feature surfaced content that wasn’t relevant to them.

In its quest to attract more users and keep them around, Twitter has sought for years to find ways to surface the best and most relevant content when it matters. Twitter has released a number of product enhancements in recent months to reduce the learning curve so beginners can get value from the service faster. It has streamlined the sign-up process to cut down the amount of time it takes for new users to figure out which accounts to follow. And it has introduced a “while you were away” feature that summarizes the best tweets users may have missed while they were signed off.

Twitter pressures celebs to use Periscope over Meerkat

Twitter has reportedly been doing everything in its power to crush Meerkat and boost its own live streaming app, Periscope. That includes hounding celebrities and media companies that still use the competing service, and even applying pressure when possible.

According to TechCrunch, which detailed Twitter’s secret plans, the company is apparently threatening to cut off Meerkat’s access to Amplify, a service it offers to big brands like the NFL. Amplify makes it easier to build promoted tweets with built-in video and spread them on the social network. Meanwhile, the company is also going after celebrities, contacting them directly if they use Meerkat instead of Periscope.

“Twitter hounds every celebrity after they try Meerkat. Almost to the point of stalking,” one anonymous insider revealed to TechCrunch. Meerkat CEO Ben Rubin told the Silicon Valley blog that his team hasn’t reached out directly to any celebrities. “Since Meerkat launched on February 27, the team has actively approached zero people asking to use our product. All we do is work with inbound,” he said.

Since launching last month, Periscope quickly overtook Meerkat as the go-to live streaming app, perhaps due to Twitter’s early work to cut off Meerkat’s access to its social graph. With Twitter pushing the new service so aggressively, there may not be much room for any serious competition, though it’s probably still too soon to count Meerkat out entirely.

Twitter Cuts Off DataSift To Step Up Its Own Big Data Business

In the push for more revenue growth, Twitter has been building up its business in areas like advertising and commerce, but a move made late Friday night points to another area where the company is setting its sights: big data analytics.

Twitter announced that it will be terminating agreements with third parties for reselling firehose data — the unfiltered, full stream of Tweets and all related metadata that goes along with them.

Instead, it will use its own in-house big data analytics team, which it developed around its acquisition of Gnip in 2014, to seek to build direct relationships with the data companies, brands and others that use Twitter data to measure consumer sentiment, market trends and other moving targets that can be better understood by tracking online conversations — a transition it says it hopes to have completed by mid-August.

DataSift, the biggest company to be affected by Twitter’s move, services thousands of businesses who in turn serve thousands more. Unsurprisingly it moved quickly to post its own reaction to the termination and its own determination to push ahead in its own business.

NTT Data, which deals only in Japanese Tweets, is still listed as a Twitter firehose partnerat the time of writing, but Twitter has confirmed to me that NTT is also affected by Friday’s announcement.

This is both a very unsurprising and sudden move, from the looks of it.

Talking to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of DataSift, he said that his company was “blindsided” by Twitter’s announcement, which it made without any warning to DataSift. He said that before this, the pair had been discussing a renewal of the deal. And while DataSift recently added Facebook — Twitter’s big social advertising competitor — as a firehose partner, it didn’t appear that this would impact those discussions.

“We were in the middle of negotiations with everything pointing to Twitter wanting to still continue to be a part of an open ecosystem,” he said, “but this is clearly now not true.” It also comes at a somewhat awkward time for the startup: it’s currently in the process of raising a new round of funding — a Series D round. To date, DataSift has raised nearly $78 million.

On the other hand, for those who have been following how Twitter has grown as a business, the company’s move to cut off third-party firehose relationships should come as no surprise.

The company has made no secret of its bigger philosophy about how it interfaces with third parties in general. In its (in)famous ‘quadrant’ diagram, the company outlined its position towards third parties that added value to what Twitter was doing versus those that effectively overlapped with Twitter’s own efforts: those who were building Twitter clients that “mimic” Twitter’s own experience in reproducing the Twitter stream were getting cut off.

You can think of last year’s move by Twitter to acquire Gnip — another firehose reseller who competed with DataSift — as a step Twitter was taking to move its interests into one more area of that quadrant.

At the time the acquisition was seen mainly as a response to Apple’s acquisition of Topsy, who had been another firehose partner. And DataSift went so far as to reassure people that its status with Twitter would not be affected. But now it’s clear that Twitter had other things in mind, too.

Zach Hofter-Shall, head of Twitter ecosystem, said as much in his blog post late Friday:

“One of the reasons Twitter acquired Gnip was because Twitter believes the best way to support the distribution of Twitter data is to have direct data relationships with its data customers – the companies building analytic solutions using Twitter’s data and platform,” he wrote. “Direct relationships help Twitter develop a deeper understanding of customer needs, get direct feedback for the product roadmap, and work more closely with data customers to enable the best possible solutions for the brands that rely on Twitter data to make better decisions…The acquisition of Gnip was the first step toward developing more direct relationships with data customers.”

In fact, whether they wanted to believe it or not, these companies were told by Twitter that they would be getting cut off nearly a year ago, we understand.

The direct relationships Twitter has with data customers, meanwhile, are also starting to take a new kind of form. Just last month, Twitter made its first investment in a startup through its new investment vehicle. The recipient? Dataminr, one of the companies that analyses Twitter firehose data, in its case to track news and financial data.

The reason why Twitter wants to tap into more big data business, of course, comes down to one big reason: money.

Since going public, Twitter has regularly faced questions about user growth. On one hand, that has led it to many iterations as it tries to snag more consumers who are not already regular Twitter users. On the other, it has increasingly focused on ways that it can better monetise what it already has.

That’s where the big-data services come in. Twitter, from what we understand, was making very little revenue from the relationship it had in place with DataSift, with the latter only giving Twitter a 20% cut on any revenues it made from when it sold on Twitter data to its customers. Cutting off the firehose to DataSift, Twitter hopes, will potentially give it access to (and better returns on) the customer deals that DataSift held before.

(The big question now will be whether Twitter manages to convince enough of the people who used to buy data through DataSift to turn directly to Twitter for those needs instead.)

“Twitter believes that creating a closed market for their data allows them to generate more revenue,” Halstead told TechCrunch. “We believe and others believe that an open ecosystem is important for a brand to understand what is going on in the market.”

As for where DataSift is turning next, the company says it is signing on more social networks to provide its own firehose data feeds. No comment from DataSift on which feed will be next, but it’s notable LinkedIn is not yet a partner. The social network for the working world is clearly looking for more ways of using its data for analytics, and this seems an obvious route to do that.

DataSift is also still able to work with Twitter data: if a third party buys data from Twitter, it can supply it to DataSift by way of a “connector” so that it can still be parsed by DataSift’s algorithms. However, this will mean significantly lower revenues for DataSift in the process from that feed.