Twitter Boss Bombs SXSW Keynote

Twitter CEO Evan Williams didn’t unveil some revolutionary new plan to actually monetize all those tweets in his keynote at SXSW yesterday, as many expected he would. Instead, he delivered “what was likely the most horrifically devastating keynote presentation in SXSW history,” Alissa Walker writes at Fast Company. Loads of audience members left halfway through, then furiously tweeted their displeasure. Many blamed buzzword-happy interviewer Umair Haque, who talked about his vacation, blog, and “generally himself.”

But some of the blame has to fall on Williams. The CEO unveiled @Anywhere, a new feature that will allow sites to easily integrate Twitter content. “It’s a slick feature,” writes Nicholas Ciarelli of the Daily Beast, but “audience members were justified in being unimpressed. … One now gets the sense that Twitter is focusing too much on being awesome, instead of addressing the more difficult questions about the future of its business.
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