Evan Williams discusses the future of Twitter

One of Twitter’s biggest problems right now is that the company still isn’t sure what it is and what it wants to be, but some of its executives and investors have an idea. One such idea comes from former chairman and CEO Evan Williams who recently revealed that he wants Twitter to become a real-time news platform. 

Just a month after heavy-hitting Twitter investor Chris Sacca penned a critical (yet aspirational) open letter to the social media platform, another one of Twitter’s own is giving his take on the company’s direction. In an interview Tuesday morning with journalist Walter Isaacson about the future of Twitter, Evan (Ev) Williams revealed that his hope is for Twitter to become a real-time news platform. Williams explained: “I think Twitter is primarily a news system. From early on, we didn’t know what it was: a social network; microblogging was a thing a lot of people called it. In 2009, we made the distinction internally and the way we started talking about it was as a real-time information network. Since then, [there have been] many applications of that [including] personal components and public components. What is news? Twitter excels at that.”