“We have to shorten the distance between awareness and engagement and be able to provide an instant timeline to that user,” he said.
Costolo said Twitter’s goals are fueled by its basic mission: to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most meaningful to them. “When you provide value to users, that value will be returned to you multifold in ways you can’t imagine.”
That mission statement is also key to understanding just what Twitter is trying to do and the impact it can have on both individuals and its business customers. Costolo cited tweets during live TV events as an example.
“During the Super Bowl in the US we were processing 4,000 tweets per second,” he said. “In the US, when an episode of the TV show Glee starts, the tweets related to Glee go up 30x and stay there until the show ends. That means the second screen we’ve been talking about forever is already here.”
Costolo also said that Twitter will be working to improve things like local relevance for its Local Trends function, with one challenge being “multi-word trends”.
Twitter is also working to expand language support. On Monday Twitter launched its Translation Center, which crowdsources translation from its user base to enable Twitter to be launched in more local languages.
The new Translation Center adds Indonesian, Russian and Turkish to Twitter’s language capabilities. Portuguese will be added a little later this year.