TWITTER BOSS STEPS DOWN

Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has announced his plans to step down to allow another colleague to come forward to steer the company during its new phase. Williams is the second Twitter CEO to step down after two years in the job. The Twitter co-founder is not leaving the company, he will instead be taking up a role in the organisation focusing on product development. Dick Costolo has been named as the new CEO at Twitter. Costolo received a place on the board back in 2007 when he invested $5 million in the company. A year ago he took on the role of chief operating officer. Before Costolo became involved with Twitter he was the Chief Executive of Feedburner before it was sold to Google. Twitter’s online audience has seen rapid growth during the time Evan Williams has headed up the company. When Williams took over as CEO in 2008 Twitter had 3 million registered users, two years on that figure now stands at 160 million. Twitter is currently free to users, however the social networking site has struck deals with Google and Bing in recent times whereby tweets related to search enquiries appear in results lists. Another means by which Twitter are able to generate revenue is via a new system of promoted tweets where companies can pay to advertise on the popular social network. The change of CEO is part of the company’s strategy to focus more on generating revenue from the micro blogging site.