Twitter CEO Shake Up

Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams are doing a bit of a dosado. @Ev is taking @Jack’s spot and moving into the CEO role, while @Jack becomes Chairman of the Board.

“We’re entering a new phase now and there are new kinds of challenges ahead. Healthy companies acknowledge the need for change even during the best of times,” Williams wrote. “As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader.” [source]

Hrm. Translation? Time to actually start playing the game for real. Step up to the plate. Man up. Grow some balls. Pick your cliche.  Any of them will work.

Twitter is still Silicon Valley’s poster child for “cool service, but um, how’ya gonna make money!?”

According to Caroline McCarthy at The Social, “Twitter is growing fast, and closed a $15 million funding round in May. It weathered an engineering shake-up this spring and has managed to largely overcome its well-publicized server problems. Plus, Twitter has become a staple in tracking political zeitgeist–cable network Current TV displayed real-time “tweets” onscreen during the presidential debates.” [source]

All that’s true, but in the end, Twitter’s going to have to step up and get it done. No more of this random, fluffy stuff. They still need a community manager, and they have to figure out exactly how it is they’re going to monetize.

Now, Ev is the guy who invented Blogger, which, granted, has become a wasteland of temporary sites, spammers, link sites and companies who aren’t really into blogging enough to actually put their blog on their own site, at one point, that was the height of blogging technology. I have faith, based on Ev’s track record, that he’ll get something sorted out, but in the meantime, we’re all wondering exactly where this is gonna go. (image source: Twitter blog)