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Twitter CEO says Instagram removing cards support was 'their prerogative'

Twitter CEO says Instagram removing cards support was 'their prerogative'

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Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stock 1024
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stock 1024

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is being interviewed for The New York Times Dealbook Conference, and he was unsurprisingly asked about his thoughts on Instagram removing support for Twitter cards in favor of driving traffic to its own site. Costolo took a moment to describe Twitter's cards, calling them "a canvas that can flow with a tweet wherever it goes," and likened tweets as "a caption" to the content being shared. He then mentioned how Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said that he wanted people to experience content on the Instagram site itself, and said "that's their prerogative." The discussion moderator asked how much notice Twitter got about the change, but Costolo laughed and declined to answer, saying "I won't worry about bothering everybody or disturbing everybody by going into those details." When he was told the audience would love to hear those details, Costolo simply declined again.

Costolo also reiterated Twitter's mission to be "the global town square" and also to provide a 360-degree view of a person. He noted that with the millions of tweets going through, it's hard to keep up — but that's where the "discover" tab introduced last December comes in. Costolo said that "we're really starting to like the algorithm" that helps to surface content through the #discover tab that users might have missed. He also discussed the challenge of trying to "surface the signal and get rid of the noise," specifically mentioning the curated 2012 Olympics page as something that ended up "not feeling like Twitter, but like the nightly news report of Twitter." Costolo said the goal moving forward is to surface content with those algorithms while still "retaining the roar of the crowd."