By Yoree Koh
Twitter last year looked into buying Instagram, the hot photo-sharing app snapped up last week by Facebook for $1 billion. But Twitter's chief executive said during a Tokyo visit Monday that Facebook's move won't push his company to seek other acquisitions to counter its rival's move.
"I think that sometimes there is a tendency for companies to react to events in the marketplace that are inconsistent with their strategy….and I think that tendency is a mistake," Dick Costolo told reporters here when asked how Facebook's purchase will affect competition in the mobile Internet scene.
He noted how tech players rushed to buy video-sharing sites after Google Inc. bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in 2006, but that many of those bets ultimately fizzled. "You can look at all sorts of other similar cases in the past when an event like this happens and people try to react to it. Copying it is never a good idea, at least history would say it's not a good idea," he said.
"We will make sure that we execute on the strategy that we have and not one that's been laid down for us based on events that happen in the marketplace," Mr. Costolo added. Part of that strategy the chief executive outlined on Monday is to focus on evolving its API, or application programming interface, so other companies can build products into Twitter much like how sellers push their wares on Amazon.com, he says. An API lets developers create programs that interact with Twitter. Twitter's API has enabled thousands of applications created by third parties, many of which use Twitter to converse with other websites.
Mr. Costolo is on a two-day trip Japan to meet with local staff and Economy Minister Motohisa Furukawa as the office here looks to "aggressively" bulk up in the months ahead. The company did not disclose the current headcount figure, but said it has made some significant hires in the engineering and sales side recently. The company is trying to keep up with the booming user base in Japan, where growth is outstripping by "several percent" the rapid growth worldwide.
Japan had the third-largest slice of Twitter users in the world based on the number of accounts created before Jan. 1, according to Semiocast, a social-media research firm. Japan's 29.9 million accounts followed behind U.S. and Brazil — but its users are more active. Some 30% of Japanese accounts posted a message during the three-month period ended November 30 compared to the global average of 27%, concludes Semiocast. And Japanese remains the second-most used language on Twitter after English.
Mr. Costolo, who says this is his third trip to Japan since becoming chief executive in 2010, pointed out that Japanese users managed to smash four Twitter records. Japan most recently set a new world record during the annual broadcast of Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 animated classic "Castle in The Sky" in December when about 25,000 tweets were blasted out per second. Japanese users first entered Twitter's history books back in the summer of 2010, when soccer fans tapped out 3,283 "mumbles" – the term used in Japan for tweets — per second when the national men's soccer team defeated Denmark at the World Cup in South Africa.
Mr. Costolo plans to discuss how features on the microblogging site can be enhanced for disaster situations, based on lessons learned from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami last year. Twitter's Japan office, which will be the command center for this project, has already started to work with the U.K. government on utilizing Twitter during national emergencies.
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