My Global Hustle

As Twitter marks its fifth anniversary, co-founder Biz Stone (@biz) and the Roots' ?uestlove (@questlove) talk tweets, privacy and what the future may hold for the microblogging juggernaut.

 

Biz Stone: Co-founder of Twitter. He's been "developing large-scale systems that facilitate the open exchange of information for more than a decade."

 

Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson: He updates followers on the musical and the mundane. With 1.5 million followers, he's a formidable presence on Twitter, helping new artists by posting clips of their rehearsals on "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," where he and Grammy Award winners the Roots churn nightly as the show's house band.

 

In a conversation that covers everything from privacy to the jaws of life to Prince possibly lurking on Twitter, the Dirty Projectors and "paying attention to what the users need," these two trendsetters get down to the Twitter nitty-gritty.

Did you expect Twitter to have such an impact on the way artists communicate with fans?

 

Stone: I was pleasantly surprised . . . to find out that folks like ?uest, who adopted Twitter really early, were using it to communicate with fans. It was the best possible scenario because they were actually listening to fans. And even cooler was that they were communicating with other artists. It was exactly what I thought wouldn't happen, which was this very open conversation.

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VIA BILLBOARD MAGAZINE