Sean Ammirati at ReadWriteTalk.com has done a nice long and detailed interview with the co-founder of twitter, Biz Stone .  It is a must read for anyone interested in twitter, microblogging an / or start up technology and Internet companies. 

There is a podcast that you can listen to and there is also the transcript listed there for you reading pleasure.  Below are are a couple of quotes from the interview to get you started, but go on over and listen / read for yourself. 

"So, I think, really the biggest thing is to ask yourself: Do I love this product? Do I personally want to use it everyday? Because that ends up just being what makes you want to wake up and run in to work and work on your stuff. It sounds sort of silly because it’s so obvious but I think a lot of people find themselves doing something for money or doing something because they think it’s a really good idea. They just don’t necessarily want to use it themselves. I think that’s a bad scenario to be in."

"Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."

This originally from Mike Arlington at Techcrunch, you can see the whole article there .

Interview with Biz Stone experts:

"Has Twitter become more stable following the issues earlier in the month? What has the Twitter team learned from the experience?

Biz Stone: “We’ve worked to isolate various parts of our system to prevent one outage from taking out the entire network. Investigation into the causes of previous bouts of instability have taught us a great deal about our usage patterns and shown us a clearer path towards being prepared for future waves of growth and usage”.

In what way has Twitter’s reliability improved?

Biz Stone: “Our recent efforts towards scalability allow us to stay on our current growth curve, and even increase the rate as we add new ways to send and receive updates such as our recent Facebook application”.

What next in terms of scalability?

Biz Stone: “We’ll continue to isolate different aspects of the system and perform micro-optimizations of heavy-usage areas. We’re currently implementing additional internal tools which will enable us to do more meaningful research of usage patterns. Finally, we are adding more machines”."

Full article here..