Twitter Founder Slams Instagram

With the recent news of Instagram now with more users than Twitter the companies co-founder, Evan Williams, had a lot to say to the press with his own comments:

“If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges,” Williams confides. He continues, “Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter, important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter.” Williams goes on to say

 If that’s happening , I frankly don’t give a sh** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.

He contends, “It’s a question of breadth versus depth. Why is users the only thing we talk about?”
He mentions that Twitter may only have about 284m active monthly users, but they also have about 500m less frequent users.

“The crazy thing: Facebook has done an amazing job of establishing that as the metric for Wall Street. No ever talks about ‘What is a [monthly active user]? I believe it’s the case that if you use Facebook Connect—if you use an app that you logged into with Facebook Connect—you’re considered a Facebook user whether or not you ever launched the Facebook app or went to Facebook.com. So what does that mean?”

Indeed, Facebook is easily the largest social network, with 864m active daily users, but you have to take into account the apps people use which logs them into Facebook without necessarily using Facebook.

The end all, of course, Williams retorts, “Twitter makes a hell of a lot more money than Instagram, if that’s what Wall Street cares about.”