By Julie Blaustein

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter

The Girls in Tech event, TWITTER NATION Fireside Chat with Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter was held at the incubator Kicklabs in San Francisco with over 100 attendees. It was moderated by Claire Cain Miller, reporter for the New York Times. The chat was full of new and interesting information about Twitter and, surprisingly Evans was quite entertaining.

Evan Williams is known for inventing the term blogger and in fact one of his previous companies, Blogger, was acquired by Google. His success is a result of his need to be driven by his passion within. He is a big fan of Napolean Dynamite who he sees as one of the biggest geeks that there is, but so geeky, that he is cool.

Twitter had over 90 million tweets the day of the event and has now more than 145 million users. Evans feels  there has been no real need for PR and Promotion until recently, and that is because they were “lucky” enough not to need it. Twitter shares a great deal of information not surprisingly, on their own Company Blog .

Eric Brown, Sarah Brown, Lisa Phillips and Dana Contreras of Twitter

Did you know that Twitter is hiring! They have grown to over 300 people and are continuing to grow. Williams feels its important to continue having meals together to get to know one another. Perks include not only working in SF but having your gym membership covered, yoga, pilates and of course most of your meals taken care of.

What is it like working at Twitter? The Twitter folks present at the event were more than enthusiastic about being a part of this fast-moving train that the entire world has either joined or is quickly jumping on board.

by Brian Solis (for a deeper discussion on the subject, please visit PR 2.0)

Mark Zuckerberg

Kara Swisher FTW – again!

During the Web 2.0 Summit, John Batelle interviewed Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and if you listened closely enough, it was clear that Batelle was prodding Zuckerberg to validate the rumors that Facebook was exploring the possibility of acquiring Twitter.

With a teasing smile, Zuckerberg described Twitter an “elegant model” and professed that he was “ impressed by what they’ve done.”

Following the session, attendees poured into the hallways dissecting the dialogue to support or discount the prospect of such a bold acquisition.

Kara Swisher has confirmed the rumors, however, an acquisition is not imminent – at least not yet.

Twitter has grown by over 600% in one year. From a business perspective, I can understand why Facebook would consider engaging in negotiations. Twitter is currently reporting six million registered users and last month, the micro community experienced its greatest traffic to date – no doubt bolstered by the 2008 Election.

The deal was close to finalization, but (thankfully) fell apart for very valid reasons.

According to Kara Swisher’s post, Facebook was attempting to acquire Twitter for $500 million in a pure stock deal based on Facebook’s disputed $15 billion valuation. Analysts peg the true estimate of Facebook’s market value closer to $5 billion, which would have positioned Twitter’s sale price at roughly $150 million – a number that investors, the board, and the company’s founders believe is far too low.

Twitter wanted cash and that’s understandable in this market. And there’s a pervasive sentiment that the company might just have a run at generating revenue while continuing to grow the community and how its users communicate with each other in the process.

From Facebook’s perspective, the stock offer was reflective of a conservative approach that reflects the reality that Twitter is not only generating $0 revenue, but its basically a substantial cost center at the moment. At the moment, Twitter pays for SMS fees associated with each text-based update. Facebook estimates that this could cost the company upwards of $75 million annually.

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words and pictures by Brian Solis

BusinessWeek released its report on the 25 most influential people on the Web today as determined by the magazine’s staff.

Congratulations to our friends as well as those we have yet to meet in person for making this prestigious list. I’ve included pictures of those that I have on hand.

Here are your influencers, in no particular order:

The Seeker: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

The Marshall: Mitchell Baker, Mozilla.org

The Innovator: Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

The Searchers: Sergey Brin, larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, Google

The Investor: Jeff CLavier, softtechvc

The Papa Bear: Paul Graham, ycombinator

The Muckracker: Arianna Huffington, HuffingtonPost

The Adviser: Joi Ito

The Mastermind: Steve Jobs, Apple

The Filmer: Jonathan Kaplan, Flip

The Communicator: Loic Le Meur, Leweb, Seesmic

The Trader: Jack Ma, alibaba.com

The Publisher: Matt Mullenweg, WordPress.org

The Mogul: Rupert Murdoch, Myspace.com

The Community Organizer: Craig Newmark, craigslist

The Traffic Driver: Gabe Rivera, Techmeme

The Poster Boy: Kevin Rose, Digg

The Adult: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

The Edutainer: Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

The Money Man: Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital, The Founders Fund

The Crafter, Maria Thomas, etsy.com

The Advocate: Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia

The Crowd Sourcer: Jimmy Wales, Wikia, wikipedia

The Blogger: Evan Williams, Twitter

The Fighter: Jerry Yang, Yahoo

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