MWC: Twitter mobile: ‚work like water‚

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo noted that every mobile device at the MWC was capable of running Twitter in one form or another. However, he mentioned that the experience differed greatly between these devices. He said that users shouldn’t have to relearn Twitter every time they switch devices, it should work like water.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo used his special keynote address at the Mobile World Congress to call on the mobile industry to more tightly integrate the social networking service into devices. He claimed that every device on show this week ‚ from the highest-end smartphone to the least expensive SMS-only phone ‚ was currently capable of supporting Twitter but noted that the experience was often different between platforms.

‚The experience has to be the same: we don’t want users having to relearn Twitter,‚ said Costolo, who stated that his vision of Twitter was to make it work like water – ‚It needs to work the same way in the bathroom as it does in the kitchen. Instantly useful and simple.‚

Twitter is using this week to meet with operators and device makers to work on embedding the service deep into devices to create what Costolo called a ‚single sign-on experience‚ and closer integration with phone features such as cameras. He noted that 40 percent of all tweets now originate via mobile devices, while 50 percent of all active users access the service via more than one platform.

Costolo also used his address to announce a crowdsource translation platform that will allow users to translate tweets into local languages. The platform will initially support Russian, Indonesian and Turkish languages with Portuguese to follow soon.

Elsewhere, Costolo revealed some impressive stats on recent Twitter usage. More than 4,000 tweets per second were registered towards the end of last week’s Super Bowl, though the record is the 6,000 tweets per second recorded in Japan at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Costolo said that the spike in Twitter usage during sports events and TV programmes such as Glee in the US and the X-Factor in the UK is proof that Twitter had effectively already created its own advertising platform. ‚We have become that second [interactive TV] screen,‚ he said.

– Story courtesy Mobile World Congress Show Daily