Twitter’s goal in 2011 is to make the social networking service simpler to use across disparate platforms, chief executive Dick Costolo said Monday.
Noting that half of Twitter users are active on more than one platform (such as mobile clients, SMS, and the Twitter web site), Costolo said one shortcoming of Twitter is that the experience of using it on each platform was dissimilar, forcing users to figure out different ways to tweet.
“We need to make Twitter more simple so that every experience is the same,” Costolo said during a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. “I shouldn’t have to think about how to use it on a different platform”
Costolo said Twitter “needs to be like my water in California – I turn it on and it works, and I don’t need to relearn how to do that.”
To that end, Twitter was spending time with OEMs, carriers and platform vendors to enable that, looking at solutions such as deeper integration in smartphones. “On Android, for example, we’ve done integration where if you take a photo, you can tweet that photo,” Costolo said. “We need that kind of integration that removes the veneer and complexity.”
Costolo also wants Twitter to help new users become engaged users more quickly.
“If a new user comes on and establishes a mutual follow – where you follow someone and they follow you back – they are far more likely to become an engaged user, and they start to follow accounts that don’t follow them back,” Costolo explained, saying the problem was the massive gap between awareness and engagement.