During an interview with Charlie Rose, Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter and Square, said he believes the immediacy and accessibility of Twitter, especially its ability to connect individuals and disseminate content, is what makes it a powerful and enduring platform.
"We've put a lot of emphasis on tweeting when a lot of the value is actually following people," Dorsey said. "And anything you're interested in the world whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop, they're on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them. [...] So I can go and get immediate value from these things that I care about. [...] But then there's another hook -- you can actually participate with. You can reply to them, and they may reply back. They're human again. And we spend so much time putting these organizations and public figures on this massive, massive pedestal, but we have to remember they go through all the small details of live that we do. And you can make them human again and you can interact with them."
Asked to explain why he believes Twitter is the "next big Internet success story," Dorsey replied, "I think it's huge because never before have we had such access to that immediate information. And once we have that information we can participate and interact with it. It spans at the intersection of every single media."
Dorsey also told Rose that he uses text messaging "a lot more" than email. Email, Dorsey explained, "[is] not great for communication because it's not focused on the most important thing. The subject is the message, and that's the message. The subject is in the message in the IM. It's bringing the content to you right away."
Dorsey described the quest for simplicity as one of his guiding principles, noting that this had helped inform his new venture, Square, a mobile payments service that allows users to accept credit card payments with their smartphones. Dorsey described iPhones as "general purpose computers."
"It's really complex to make something simple," Dorsey observed. "My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction."
Watch the full interview on CharlieRose.com.
Transcript of interview via Charlie Rose/TechCrunch