Twitter already has over 300 employees, but Thursday it hired its first Washington D.C. staff member.
Adam Sharp, who previously held positions at C-SPAN, NBC News and the U.S. Senate, is joining Twitter as Manager of Government and Political Partnerships.
Don’t think Sharp will be Twitter’s official lobbyist, though.
Instead, the U.S. politics veteran will work closely with both candidates for office and policymakers at every level to ensure they are getting the most out of Twitter’s microblogging service. Politicians aren’t always the most tech-savvy people, so Sharp will ensure their voice is being heard among the constituency.
Before Sharp’s hiring, Twitter had already proven to be an invaluable tool in the political sphere, here in the United States and anywhere else in the world open to adding more communication channels. This past Tuesday, news and media organizations used Twitter to break the news of House and Senate losses and victories. In the months leading up to the election, pretty much every viable candidate employed a Twitter account to some degree, and not for nothing.
Twitter will likely only gain more influence in upcoming elections.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is to be replaced by Democratic victor Jerry Brown on January 3, even tweeted out his votes on state propositions.
Adam Sharp is departing his position as Executive Producer of Digital Services at C-SPAN. Previously, he’s served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Senator Mary L. Landrieu (D-La.), and Manager of eBusiness & Digitization at NBC News. With far-reaching experience in both politics and technology, Sharp couldn’t be more perfect for his new job.
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
