The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘culture’

Marc Lore and Vinit Bharara have figured out a formula for selling low-margin goods online and shipping them overnight to customers. The two entrepreneurs have built Diapers.com into the largest seller of diapers and other baby products on the Web. Diapers.com is on track to bring in $300 million in revenues this year. Now the two are getting ready to launch a new e-commerce site, Soap.com..

It will sell much more than just soap. When it launches in July, Soap.com will offer 25,000 products—daily essentials ranging from cleaning supplies to toothpaste. By the end of the year, it will offer 60,000 different products, all at the same price you’ll find at Target or Wal-Mart, and about 25 percent less than at a typical drugstore, with free overnight shipping for orders of $50 or more. The overnight shipping is key because when you run out of toilet paper you can’t really wait around three days for your order to arrive.

The parent company, Quidsi, raised $30 million last year which they’ve been using to prepare for the launch of Soap.com. It will use the same warehouses and facilities that Diapers.com uses, and the same back-end inventory, logistics, and shipping software. The company recently moved to new fully-automated warehouses on both coasts, and now has 2.5 million square feet of warehouse space ready and waiting. “All the robots are in place,” says Bharara. They will pick and pack your soap and get it to you by the time you take your morning shower, or at least by the time you get home from work.

Here is a cool video showing how those robots give Quidsi a competitive advantage:

Friday is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 26th birthday. My guess is he’s won’t be enjoying it as much as he should, given that the top tech story of the day is a look at a private instant message exchange he supposedly had six or seven years ago at Harvard. The messages show a callous disregard for personal information added by early Facebook users. Given that Facebook is in one of its regularly scheduled privacy scuffles right now, the connection is just too juicy. The press has gone wild.

It’s completely out of hand, and it’s just another example of an online mob getting out of control. I’m embarrassed to see people I respect stopping one step short of calling for physical violence against Zuckerberg. And they certainly aren’t stopping short of calling him every nasty thing they can think of. The Huffington Post actually compared Facebook’s privacy issues to the BP oil spill. Shameful.

The Facebook privacy issue is a reasonable thing to debate. Whether or not Vice President of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage gave a reasonable defense of the company’s privacy policies to the New York Times is also a reasonable thing to debate. Even a high profile person saying they’re going to close their Facebook account, obviously for competitive or for promotional purposes, isn’t going too far.

But what Mark Zuckerberg said or didn’t say six years ago isn’t relevant to anything. It isn’t an indication of his character, or how he views privacy today. It’s nothing, a snip of a private conversation without context and certainly without the benefit of knowing more about him as a person.

Who here hasn’t said something stupid when they were 19? Who here hasn’t done something dumb when they were 19? None of you. If you’re getting all self righteous, you’re lying to yourself.

Six years ago Zuckerberg had no idea what Facebook would become, or how much he’d have to change and mature to handle it. He’s the CEO of one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. He is leading a team that is recreating and redefining our culture as a society.

And frankly, none of what Facebook is doing privacy-wise should be a surprise to anyone. At a high level anyway. Facebook is trying to invent, on the fly, an entirely new way or organizing the Internet. 500 million people a month visit the site. They can’t do anything at all without angering some portion of them. And since the service is growing and evolving so fast there’s no way change won’t happen.

These uproars have been happening since we first started covering Facebook in 2005. At first it was college students enraged that high school students were being let in. Then they were enraged that everyone else was let in. And so on.

In ten years, or less, Facebook will have found its way for the long term. Change will come much more slowly then. And frankly it’ll be boring. We’ll look back to 2005-2010 as the roller coaster ride that it is. We’re lucky to be part of it. The Age of Facebook is just beginning, and we have front row seats to the show.

Facebook will probably change some of the ways that they handle privacy to at least make it easier to understand what’s going on. And they may communicate to users in a way that pacifies them instead of enrages them. The media will always be there to fan the flames. But let’s at least take a step back and put a little perspective on who Mark Zuckerberg is today. Who he was in 2004 is far less interesting.

And please don’t accuse us of being Facebook fanboys. We call them out regularly, from the financial ties to Scamville to major security breaches like the recent Facebook Chat issue. And don’t even get me started on the Holocaust denial stuff. In the past Facebook has threatened to cut off all communication with us over their perception of our overly negative coverage, in fact. We call it like we see it. And in this case, the attacks on Zuckerberg are way out of line.

Editor’s Note: The following guest post was written by Cyan Banister, the founder and CEO of Zivity, a venture-funded adult content site that invites users to interact with models and photographers. Banister is also an active angel investor.

In just over a month, my friend (and Zappos CEO) Tony Hsieh will be launching his new book, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose (you can pre-order it here). Reading a preview copy of the book led me to think back about the first time I met Tony, and what an impression it made on me.

You meet a lot of people in your life. Think about it for a moment. How many people do you think you’ve met? Count up all of the social events, work, airplanes, school and checkout counters. Out of all of those people, think about who you really remember. Think about those people and then pick out the most memorable five people of all and trace back the steps to where you first met.

We sometimes forget those moments until prompted, but I truly feel those are some of the most precious moments in our lives. They are like birthdays. Tiny sparks of joy and connection that sometimes you get the immediate hunch will last a lifetime. That’s how I felt when I met Tony Hsieh. I’ll never forget it and I’m going to guess I’m not alone.

Like meeting Tony, I’ll never forget my first Zappos experience. I was working at IronPort and a coworker liked my shoes and asked me if I ordered them from Zappos. I asked what Zappos was and he said proudly, “Only the greatest shoe store online. You can order as many shoes as you like and they’ll send them overnight. You try them on and send back the ones you don’t like. No questions asked.” This sounded too good to be true. It wasn’t. I now own at least 15 pairs of shoes from Zappos and even though I had the option, I never sent anything back.

So, on one of my trips to Defcon, I decided it was time to put on a pair of those shoes and take a tour of Zappos. I had left IronPort, which had an amazing culture, but it wasn’t a consumer company. It was an enterprise company hellbent on winning and never sleeping. There were cultural aspects of IronPort I knew I wanted to take with me, but I knew I needed to learn more. I had heard about Tony and Alfred and I hoped I’d like them, because I hoped we could be friends and that we could learn from each other.

I arrived at Zappos and received my first smile. The front desk is a bit of a celebration. There’s a popcorn machine, library, seating area, Zappos gear, music and just a lot going on. I arranged my tour with Tony directly and I expected him to outsource that to someone else in the company, but he came out to show me around personally. He picked up a Zappos themed tour flag that he carried the rest of the journey.

Tony was curious about my background and when he found out that I ran worldwide support for IronPort, he immediately took me to meet all of his support managers and he let me ask them any question I wanted. We talked openly and I was floored. In the 30 minutes we spent together, I learned so much about how Zappos delivered amazing service. I toured HR, engineering, marketing, purchasing, the break room, the nap room — everything.

I asked Tony, “How do you hire so many happy people? How do you hire so many smiling people?” and he responded, “I only hire people who smile.”

After the tour was over, Tony asked me about my favorite books and then he picked up a Zappos bag and put two books inside, the Zappos culture book and Made to Stick – why some ideas survive and others die. He told me those were his favorite books.

Then, the moment I’ll never forget happened. He took everything out of my hands and he and Alfred Lin walked me to my car carrying it. They put it in the car and took me to lunch. The CEO and COO of Zappos carried my bag. The CEO and COO of Zappos carried my bag! I repeated it over and over in my head.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to start Zivity anymore. Part of me really wanted to work at Zappos. Part of me really wanted to be part of the team that expanded that culture from 200 to 1000 employees. However, sadly, I didn’t live in Las Vegas and couldn’t. I settled for a lifelong friendship with Tony and Alfred. Not a bad deal.

After the Amazon acquisition of Zappos, I wondered what Tony would do next. A lot of CEOs say they’ll stick around and I believed he would, but I figured he had other fun things up his sleeve. When I found out it was a book, I was excited, but I wasn’t sure I’d have a lot to learn from it after two tours (I went back again!) and years of getting to know him and Zappos.

I was wrong. What I didn’t know about Zappos was what I didn’t know about Tony. This book is raw and it is a slice of who Tony is and why Zappos is. You learn about little Tony and his family. You follow him from childhood to modern day Tony and you learn about worm farms, mail-order businesses, pizza, quitting jobs, poker, raves, hikes up mountains, epiphanies and you get a strong sense of why Tony joined Zappos.

There’s a great analogy in the book about his worm farm and his first fortune he made from selling Link Exchange to Microsoft. He bet both “farms” and on one he lost his worms and the other was valued at over 1 billion dollars.

What I also didn’t realize about Zappos was how many times it almost died. Many people see success and they just focus on that, but they don’t always realize the hard work that goes into it. Zappos took over 10 years to get to where it is today and almost went out of business no less than 5 times along the way. Following along with every pitfall in the book is like watching an Indiana Jones movie. You know everything is going to turn out great, but you never know where there’s going to be snakes.

What makes Zappos great are its employees and the culture they created. You hear a lot of people talk about how important employees are and how they are their core asset, but I’ve never seen them live it like Zappos. It is inspiring and infectious, but it didn’t come right away. As a matter of fact, it was quite an evolution. Their culture was a constant iteration and I think they’ve found something they want to stick with for a while. Their brand promise has gone through many changes:

1999 – Largest Selection of Shoes
2003 – Customer Service
2005 – Culture and Core Values as Our Platform
2007 – Personal Emotional Connection
2009 – Delivering Happiness

The Zappos boxes used to say “Delivering Service” but now they all say “Delivering Happiness”, because as you’ll see in the book from customer testimonials, their culture bleeds over into each and every customer interaction and it is their true competitive advantage. People love Zappos and Zappos makes them happy. Every box is a unit of happiness. The experience from beginning to end is how each and every experience should be or is how you want it to be when you ride a plane, purchase a ticket, call your cellphone company, order food, etc.

In the beginning of this post, I asked you to think about five memorable people. Now I want you to think about every service you’ve ever interacted with. I want you to think about five that were really memorable and made you happy. If you have a moment, share those stories in the comments. If you don’t have a story, share five services you wish could be improved.

The book is a call to a higher cause in businesses. To align your passions, profits and purpose. To discover what happiness truly is and to make products, work, life and everything you touch something to remember forever.

When I started Zivity, I tried to build a dollhouse. A perfect replica of what I knew in the past. I applied what I thought I learned from Zappos and I failed. We ended up over hiring and letting people go. Reading this book helped me to finally forgive those mistakes, because we figured it out before it was too late and we still have time to get it right.

What I didn’t realize until I read the book was that my company wasn’t completely defined by our employees and customers, but also by our 1500 contractors (models and photographers). I focused all of my efforts in the wrong area. I worked hard on trying to build a culture internally and a community externally.

Inspired by Delivering Happiness the Book, we’re putting together our own culture book. These will be raw testimonials, unedited of what Zivity means to them. Whenever anyone asks me again what Zivity is, I’ll tell them what I think it is and then hand them the book (which may start out as a pamphlet, who knows). I want Zivity to be truly transparent and I want to be able to always know who we are and what we stand for. You can have a community, but is harder to have a strong culture. Our passion, profits and purpose are all aligned, but our culture was not.

If you get a chance, I hope you can read the book and given this blog is read by entrepreneurs (new, experienced or hopefuls), technologists, employees of services and web enthusiasts, I hope that you’ll join the higher cause as well to create amazing varieties of diverse cultures and lasting services that outlast you.

Two nights ago, three former PayPal execs took the stage at Startup2Startup to look back at the early days of the payments company (and some of their blunders), as well as the culture at their current companies. The speakers included: Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal and is now founder/CEO of Slide; Jeremy Stoppelman, who was PayPal’s VP of Engineering and is now the cofounder/CEO of Yelp; and David Sacks, who was PayPal’s COO and is now founder/CEO of both Yammer and Geni. Moderating the fireside chat was Dave McClure (a former PayPal employee himself), who cofounded Startup2Startup with Leonard Speiser.

The PayPal alums talked at length about the company’s history, including some of the horror stories they took part in (Levchin recounted one incident where he accidentally wiped out the only copy of PayPal’s master secret key used to decrypt every credit card on file at PayPal). The conversation then turned toward company culture, and which hot companies in Silicon Valley seemed poised to breed the most entrepreneurs. We’ve embedded videos of the full discussion below.

Part 1

Part 2

Two years ago I was on the Charlie Rose show and we talked about, among other startups and trends, Facebook. It wasn’t clear then that Facebook had what it took to become one of the great technology companies. They had conquered the college market and were destroying the hopes and dreams of MySpace. But they were also reeling from the Beacon debacle and hadn’t proven that they could turn those massive reach and page views into sustainable revenue streams.

You can watch the whole discussion about Facebook, which begins at about the 22:00 mark. But the key question I asked then was, “Will Facebook Have their Google moment?” I was referring to Google’s ability to pair awesome search in the late nineties with, later, an amazing business model – a bidding system for text ads. In 2008 it was clear that Facebook had taken the first step and changed our culture, possibly permanently. But it wasn’t at all clear that they would create the massive revenue streams to allow them to effectively dominate tech culture.

Fast forward to today. Those questions have been answered. Facebook is profitable and probably is running at a billion dollar plus revenue run rate today. They have 400 million users and 500 million people visit the site each month. Only Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have more monthly visitors than Facebook. And only Google has more page views. And they aren’t done growing yet. In a year they will likely be second on the list of unique visitors. In two years, they’ll probably be first.

In a talk a few days ago investor Ron Conway spoke about the explosive growth of Facebook. “They are the universe,” he said. I asked him if we are in the Age of Facebook. His answer was yes. Ron has been investing in startups for thirty years and he has seen the rise and fall of many companies. This wasn’t just idle chatter.

Microsoft dominated the technology world in the 90s on the back of their Windows and Office products. Google was the champion for the last decade after perfecting the business model around search. Both are still huge companies.

But all the momentum is behind Facebook and how they are changing the Web, and our culture.

Last week Facebook unveiled a variety of new developer tools, and new consumer applications are set to be launched in the near future. What’s most interesting about these changes aren’t the debates about whether what Facebook is doing is good for the Internet or not, or how open or not open their solutions are.

Those debates are important but they don’t affect the Facebook revolution any more than debates about Adsense a decade ago affected the decade of glory that Google just experienced. The fact is that Facebook is permeating the Web. Publishers, us included, are clamoring to organize our websites in ways that please Facebook.

Their vision of an open graph of people and things (with Facebook at the center) is becoming reality, and debates by technologists won’t changes that. Facebook is taking over our identity and we are going along with that happily. It will take a new technology paradigm to disrupt what Facebook is doing.

Microsoft’s Windows platform wasn’t threatened by user complaints, lawsuits or even government actions to weaken it. It took the evolution of the browser as an operating system, and new applications like Google Docs, to give users the comfort to move beyond Windows. And while the Windows franchise is still going strong, the writing is on the wall. Eventually, it will fall.

Someday, maybe a decade from now, some new technology will rise and allow other companies to threaten Facebook. But until then there is little to stop them. Their march to dominance has just begun.

The South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism doesn’t want the country’s youth becoming addicted to video games, particularly MMOs, so it’s imposing a ban of sorts .

Read the original post:
South Korea imposes midnight gaming ban to prevent addiction

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh sent an email to all Zappos employees today after the announcement of Alfred Lin’s resignation. He reassures everyone that he and Fred Mossler, the no. 3 executive, would not be leaving the company. And he also hints at a new project they’re working on:

PS: Fred and I are also working on a secret long-term project together which, if everything works out, will be really really cool and amazing for Zappos. We’re still in the exploratory stages right now but we’re getting more excited about it as each day passes.

The full email is below. Also check out the interview Sarah Lacy did with Hsieh at our conference last year.

—–Original Message—–
From: Tony Hsieh
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2010 11:06 AM
To: All Zappos Employees
Cc: Fred Mossler
Subject: Life Changing Moments (fwd)

While we’ll be sad to see Alfred go, I want to lay to rest some rumors that I’ve been hearing through the grapevine about the possibility of Fred and/or me leaving Zappos.

As Fred likes to say, we’re just scratching the surface as to what Zappos can become, and the next several years are going to be very exciting as continue to grow Zappos, 6pm, our clothing business, and our other product lines. My book is set to launch June 7 and we’ve got some pretty cool stuff planned to take our culture to the next level, which I’ll be talking more about in future emails. Our business is growing at about 40% year over year, and our TV campaign is just getting started.

We’ve got more momentum than we’ve ever had in the history of the company. It’s a super exciting time, and Fred and I wouldn’t miss it for the world!

PS: Fred and I are also working on a secret long-term project together which, if everything works out, will be really really cool and amazing for Zappos. We’re still in the exploratory stages right now but we’re getting more excited about it as each day passes.

Alfred Lin, the COO/CFO of Zappos, has left the company and will join Sequoia Capital. Lin was the no. 2 executive at Zappos at the time of its acquisition by Amazon, and has had a nearly flawless resume as an entrepreneur over the years. Every company he’s worked for has been acquired, and the smallest deal was $265 million. See our post “Alfred Lin Has The Midas Touch: The Man With $2 Billion In Acquisitions Under His Belt.”

Lin isn’t leaving Zappos until the beginning of 2011.

Here’s the email Lin sent to all employees at Zappos earlier today:

Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:13:50 -0700
From: Alfred Lin
To: employees@zappos.com
Subject: Life Changing Moments

First, I’m sorry for letting you know all this information in an email. If it was doable, I would have preferred to speak to each of you personally, but that is sadly not really possible. The idea of thinking through whom I should tell first and in what order was also very agonizing. Being true to our core values, it is just a lot easier to be open and honest and let everyone know sooner rather than later. Although this still feels a little weird as I write this, we don’t shy away from weirdness at Zappos, so here it is…

First, Rebecca (my wife and my true boss) and I are getting into the baby business. Rebecca’s now 9 weeks along and so far so good. I’ve learned more about the baby business than I would have even expected, like why, in general, you might not want to tell too many people until after the first 12 weeks. Or why, when a woman reaches a certain age, her pregnancy gets classified as a high-risk pregnancy. (I am probably going to get hit over the head for that.) In any case, keep your fingers crossed and we are really delighted to share this happy news with all of you.

Over the past 2 months, Rebecca and I have talked a lot more about what is important to us and what we should do as a family. It is the general stuff you talk about, but you may only talk about superficially until it hits you that you are actually going to be a parent. As agonizing as it is for us to come to this conclusion, we really believe that the right place for us as a family is to move back to the SF Bay Area and be closer to some of our extended family.

To complicate the life discussions, if you had asked me 5 or 10 years ago what I am passionate about and what my higher purpose would be, I would have said that my calling is to help interpret the visions and dreams of entrepreneurs about how the world should be and help build businesses around those visions and dreams. So to that end, I wanted to be a venture capitalist and join Sequoia Capital. They’ve financed and helped built some really special and enormously successful companies, including Google, Yahoo, Paypal, YouTube, Cisco, Oracle, Apple, and also Zappos. I had explored joining them twice, but things never really worked out before. Recently, I went out to beers and then dinner with a few of their partners to catch up on life and in their inebriated state, they made the silly mistake of extending me a position on their team roster (although the envelope was actually marked “For Rebecca”).

You might be shocked to read that I have decided to leave Zappos. It has been a hard decision, and I am still in a bit of a daze myself, but I am also very excited. I have learned so much from all of you along our journey and I am excited to put that knowledge to work to help finance and help build companies in the special ways we have built Zappos. So the silver lining is that hopefully Zappos will give birth to other very special and enormously successful companies.

Tony, Fred and I have had a few conversations with some folks at Amazon and they are committed to helping us find the right person to fill my sample-size shoes (9D). As always with any Zappos employee, that person will, first and foremost, have to live and breathe the Zappos culture, and help continue the good work to build the Zappos brand, business, and culture, independent of Amazon.

Now that the news is out, I also want to assure you that I am not going anywhere anytime soon. I’m committed to Tony, Fred, Amazon, and each and every one of you to making this a very smooth transition. To that end, I plan to stay at Zappos through January 3, 2011. Of course, this timeline may change, since our business continues to grow fast and each and every one of you do such an amazing job that I am sure the transition can and may be completed sooner.

In any case, while parting is such sweet sorrow, it is not time to say our goodbyes yet. We have some work to do and always will…like taking first place in the Corporate Challenge relay tonight. Hope to see you there.

Update: Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh emails employees.

We’re here at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas where Twitter co-founder Evan Williams doing a keynote Q&A with Umair Haque. Williams may use the time to talk a bit about Twitter’s upcoming ad platform. Update: It’s actually an “At Platform” called At Anywhere — more here.

Interestingly enough, Twitter saw its first burst of popularity three years ago at this very conference.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

UH: Ev you have something pretty interesting you want to say today?

EW: Yeah, we want to announce something. We wanted to announce our new “At Platform” (undoubtedly to be spelled an @ Platform) – a way to integrate Twitter into any website. “At Anywhere” – basically this allows you to place the Twitter hovercards on any site. We have 13 sites we’re launching with including Amazon, ebay, Yahoo, Digg, Bing, Meebo, Salesforce.

UH: So what can you do with this?

EW: You can easily tweet from any page that is using this. Also, maybe you want talk to authors of posts without going to Twitter itself, you can just hover over their name and tweet them. Twitter is a very easy way to keep in touch.

UH: So this helps you contextualize information. But why would sites use this?

EW: A connection to users you didn’t have before – and it keeps people coming back. And it will result in more followers for a site. Also, hopefully more people who are your fans using twitter to talk about you or your content. And you can bring in users’ tweets talking about your site.

UH: So it’s a platform to juice up site’s networks and virility. But it’s an “At Platform” not an “Ad Platform”.

EW: Yeah, it’s about lowering the barrier for information.

UH: What makes 21st century businesses different? Like Twitter? The first principle to me is experimentation. Why are you willing to explore different possibilities?

EW: Experimentation lets you create value. “Whatever you assume when you start out, you’re wrong.” Most of the great businesses of our time have experimented. Like Google.

UH: So it’s about creating value, then figuring it out?

EW: Yes, it’s about creating experience for users and businesses. There is a ton of business use on Twitter today — it’s one of the biggest uses. We want to make that better, easier, faster.

UH: What is Twitter evolving to?

EW: What is Twitter has always been a tough question to answer. We think of it as an information network — different from a social network. It’s about getting info and also sharing. You can take advantage of Twitter without sharing anything about your life. We need to increase the signal-to-noise ratio.

UH: So better information, better connections, better choices.

EW: Yes.

UH: Experimentation is about iteration. So how does that happen at Twitter?

EW: We have a bunch of awesome people in the company now. We’ve grown very quickly over the past year. Our employee growth curve is almost like our user growth curve now. We have people on focused teams, like mobile, or internationalization. We’re worried about central thinking and slow processes. So we tell our teams to “go for it.”

UH: So what’s your role?

EW: I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code, cause things would be a big mess. I spend most of my time thinking about the high level issues. And I think a lot about the company – how do we scale the company, about our culture, etc. How do we define the characteristics we want. I think there is a parallel between the service and the company — openness is huge, transparency.

UH: So openness is very important. Help us trace the arc of openness at Twitter.

EW: Yeah, it means a lot of things. We debated if openness or transparency. “A window is transparent, but a door is open.” The users have taken Twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. Now developers are doing the same thing. Openness is really a survival technique.

I sit down with new employees when they start and go over 9 assumptions you should have about working at Twitter. One key one is assume there are more smart people outside the company than insides.

UH: What about giving the golden goose away? Why be so open?

EW: That was a big question for us – the deals with Bing and Google. These were the first guys we shared our full stream with. There’s a lot of debate about that. Because we don’t have a business model yet, so why give it away? But we went back to the principle of giving users the most value.

There are 50 million tweets a day, how do we show you the best ones for you? Right now, we don’t do a good enough job of that. But with these partnerships, we have more chances to do that.

UH: Was there a lot of internal debate about this?

EW: Yeah, there was a ton. But we decided it was good. And now we’ve expanded the deals – like with Yahoo. And a few weeks ago we talked about giving this data to thousands of others.

Now third party developers are building a lot of value. Like adding pictures to Twitter.

CoTweet and HootSuite are really interesting too. Twitter.com isn’t a good interface for doing customer support, but those guys are. CoTweet just got acquired by a company that wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating these deep experiences that create value.

UH: So experimentation and openness. Other companies want control, like Apple. How open are you guys?

EW: We’re pretty open – there is some control we need to employ because if we were infinitely open we’d be doing a disservice to users. Openness can work against you still. It has to be managed a lot. Having an open API makes it easier to make apps that will spam users. We send cease and desists everyday to companies making spam tools. We have to exert some control.

UH: I think shepherding is a good way to put it. So you had some interesting use recently – such as the earthquake in Chile.

EW: I got an email recently about the earthquake, thanking us for helping with the situation. This is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important for Twitter to reach the weakest signals in the world. We started out with a big focus on SMS – and it’s still really important to us. Because it reaches so many people. We have deals with 65 carriers around the world to send these SMS tweets.

We’re at the beginning. We’re seeing really strong growth in India where SMS is huge. And in the Middle East.

UH: I think this changing the world stuff is the future for entrepreneurs. It gets to the heart of the point about inclusiveness. So – what is an “active user”?

EW: To me it comes back to – is someone getting value out of Twitter? If they don’t have an account it’s hard to know, like people who search Google for tweets. In the beginning we put a lot of focus on telling the world or your friends and family what you’re doing. But now there is something interesting on Twitter for everyone – like the Flaming Lips being on Twitter, you can get updates on the band.

And as more people start getting information on Twitter, they’re more likely to get involved.

UH: Someone has started using Twitter inside the White House, right?

EW: Yeah, it’s really interesting that it’s from in the White House. It’s an official channel, but they’re using it a different type of way. It’s about reducing the walls between people with a lot of influence, and those who they influence. And that’s the most profound promise of the Internet. This is the wave I started on 10 years ago with blogging. It’s about the democracy of information. Anyone can put information on the web — that’s huge.

UH: Tweet Minister in the UK aggregates the tweets from members of parliament. This is re-wiring society in some ways. But we also have a counter-force – like state control of information.

EW: In some regions, yes, this is bad and hurting the web. But the Internet is a tidal wave that you will not be able to keep out. Like in China, who knows how long those firewalls will hold up – but not forever.

UH: Yes, there are many ways to get through the firewalls already. There’s a lot of pressure on them.

Let’s talk about “betterness.” I booked a trip to his five star resort in an exotic land. When I got there, it was a shack. The manager couldn’t do anything — so I put it on Twitter. Within 15 minutes the booking company called me, and in 20 minutes I got a new hotel. In a half an hour my vacation was fixed.

EW: That’s great. Our hope is that this is the norm, not a fluke. We have a bit of a dichotomy, because there is more everyday you want to search for. We don’t just want to maximize that, we hope to make Twitter more useful to you. We want to decrease time you spend on Twitter, not increase it.

Recently we went through a process to define our operating principles. The number one principle is “be a force for good.” Another principle is “pay attention.”

UH: David Pogue did a campaign against hidden charges from the carriers. It’s the same thing with the hotel operator and me. I know you’re a big fan of Warren Buffet – he also believes in creating real value.

EW: Yes, from a business perspective, Twitter needs to fundamentally be about helping people make better decisions. Or the help something happen that normally wouldn’t. Like the donations to Haiti through text message — we weren’t taking the money, but it spread virally through Twitter. People want to help each other out, we need to reduce the friction.

UH: Is that what you want to do with the new At Platform?

EW: Yes, totally. We’ll see what happens, the obvious stuff is more tweeting, but I think it’s a lowering of the friction as well.

UH: You ask yourself, how would i make Walmart better? Why ask yourself that?

EW: Because as we look at how businesses are using Twitter – we want our tool to help businesses get better.

The world is so often a black box where there is no communication. There’s a lack of dialogue and a lack of transparency. The promise of all these technologies is that this goes away. You close the loop.

UH: Outline for us your big picture goals.

EW: Fostering the open exchange of information. To be a force for good. The ease of exchange of information is important. Help out other people with something as small as a retweet. That’s our ambition.

UH: Google is all about archiving the world’s information. Yours is different — creating new information.

It’s all about advantage though – what’s your advantage.

EW: Our advantage will only come if everyone wins. We only do win-win deals. Because any deal where someone is losing is unsustainable. That’s why we haven’t turned on the revenue yet — there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, but none of it is sustainable.

Creating an advantage for other people and not giving them a reason to work around you – that’s key.

UH: Is the Internet making a better media industry?

EW: I think there’s a huge shift going on – but it’s an ecosystem where everything is involved. This user-generated content just makes things richer. Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter compliments traditional media. I was talking last night to some guys from CNN – it’s helped them change what they do. It’s a win-win.

UH: How will the At Platform speak to that?

EW: Hopefully these guys will us it to get the new out there.

UH: What makes you tick?

EW: There are two types of entrepreneurs. What drives me is creating things that didn’t exist before. Your product or service should be at the end of the sentence: “wouldn’t it be awesome if…”

It’s creating new stuff versus extracting from old stuff. There are people who look at money as the goal versus the teams. I create businesses to make new things. It’s a fuel for creating more things in the world. I’ve been lucky to stumble upon things that have helped change the world.

UH: Why focus on these things though?

EW: Largely luck. But maybe it’s what interests me. Twitter was a side project of Odeo – my cofounders came up with it. Blogging was a side project too at one point.

UH: If something is awesome, people will use it.

EW: Yes.

Also, helping others succeed is a sub principle of ours.

UH: Tell us one or two more of them.

EW: Be a force for good, pay attention — make things happen is another one. There’s also building a culture of trust.

UH: What are your big lessons to other entrepreneurs?

EW: Create something you want to exist in the world. Another is focus. Many people are trying to do a lot of things when they should be doing one thing. You may be wrong with whatever you’re trying out, but you’ll try other things.

A lot of the great companies are now coming from outside Silicon Valley. You don’t have to be there.

That’s a wrap.

New data released from analytics service Hitwise today names Facebook the largest website in the U.S. with 7.07% of all U.S. visits. Google is second at 7.03%. Yahoo Mail is third with 3.8% and Yahoo is fourth at 3.67% (if you combined both Yahoo properties, and I’m not sure why they don’t, Yahoo would be first). YouTube (a Google property) is fifst with 2.14%.

This is the first time Hitwise has named Facebook the top site in the U.S. Comscore still ranks Google the top site by reach at 81% of the U.S. population. Facebook, at 53%, is still behind Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sites in the U.S., according to the most recent Comscore data from February 2010.