Some of the comments during a back-and-forth discussion we had on Twitter were interesting, so I thought I would excerpt them here, and also include a Storify collection of the debate as well. I’m hoping to talk more about this and other topics with the former Twitter CEO at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference in November.

During his time as Twitter’s CEO, Williams had to deal with the beginnings of Twitter’s transformation from a cool project into an actual revenue-generating company, as it started to acquire third-party apps and caused a backlash among developers that is very similar to the one it is facing today. Williams left Twitter in 2010 when he was replaced by Dick Costolo, and formed a startup incubator called Obvious Corp. with former Twitter colleague Biz Stone (which recently launched a new-media publishing platform called Medium) but the former CEO has remained an advisor to the company and a board member.

While Twitter was trying to figure out in 2010 which external services it wanted to incorporate and which it wanted to leave alone — a process that angel investor Chris Dixon compared to “a drunk guy with an Uzi” — Williams admitted that the company had screwed up its relationship with developers, and Twitter held a whole conference for developers called Chirp that was supposed to try and repair that relationship. In reality, however, the tensions between where Twitter wanted the company to go and how that was going to affect third-party apps remained just below the surface, and erupted again recently after moves like the announcement of new API rules and the shutting off of features to services like Tumblr and Instagram.

What role has the ecosystem played?

Our Twitter discussion started when Williams mentioned a phrase from my recent post about the company’s ongoing struggle with being open vs. controlling the network. I argued that much of the early power and growth of the network came from being open, since many of the things we associated with Twitter — such as the @ mention for users, the hashtag, and even the retweet — were not developed by the company but came from the users themselves, in many cases assisted by third-party apps. But Williams said that this influence is “a common myth but completely overblown”:

@mathewi "virtually all of the network’s power and growth has come from outside the company itself"—a common myth but completely overblown

—
Evan Williams (@ev) September 06, 2012

At this point, Anil Dash — who used to work for blogging platform Six Apart and now has a media consulting firm — agreed with Williams that the focus on how much of a role third-party apps played in Twitter’s success is overstated:

@mathewi I think the "Twitter was made by third party things" is mostly nerd triumphalism, not factual. Shaq did more than any indie app.

—
Anil Dash (@anildash) September 06, 2012

Dash also noted that some of the elements we associate with Twitter — even hashtags, which Chris Messina (now of Google) was the first to use on Twitter — were used in other ways on the internet before Twitter came along, and others noted that the @ symbol was also used on services such as Internet Relay Chat. Williams then pointed out that if it wasn’t for the company’s decision to incorporate and support those features, they would never have become part of Twitter to begin with.

@mathewi @anildash This is how products evolve. You have 1M ideas—some come from usage, some from inside. You pick and choose carefully.

—
Evan Williams (@ev) September 06, 2012

I tried to argue that the point wasn’t to try and determine which played a larger role, the ecosystem or Twitter itself and the decisions it made (some of which irritated users, such as the decision to implement retweets in a different way). The point for me is that the relationship between users — and third-party services — and Twitter has always been much more symbiotic than it has a traditional company-user dynamic. And a big part of that was a wide-open API that let tweets flow wherever they wanted to, something Twitter has been busy shutting down.

Ethan Kaplan, a developer who is a vice-president at Live Nation and used to work for Warner Brothers Records, put it well when he said that all developers really want is for Twitter to admit the relationship is symbiotic, rather than parasitic:

@mathewi @chrismessina ultimately what we all want is twitter to stop treating their ecosystem as parasitic. It isn’t. It’s symbiotic.

—
Ethan Kaplan (@ethank) September 06, 2012

And Chris Messina — who noted that the third-party app Tweetie (which Twitter ultimately acquired and turned into the official iPhone app) was the first to support hashtags — said that one of the things the company has failed to do is to make it clear who it is making all of its recent changes for. As I’ve pointed out before, it argues that it is doing so for users, but is that really the case? I have to admit that I’m not convinced.

@ethank @mathewi is it that? It feels like there's not sufficient transparency behind the motivation for the changes. Who're they *for*?

—
Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) September 06, 2012

I’ve embedded the full version of the Storify below, with as many of the comments as I could find (apologies to those whose contributions I missed). Interestingly enough, Twitter has said that the new API rules aren’t meant to apply to services like Storify, even though the company seems to fall into the wrong quadrant of customer product lead Michael Sippey’s by-now-infamous chart.

[View the story "Evan Williams on Twitter and its ecosystem" on Storify]

Evan Williams on Twitter and its ecosystem

Storified by Mathew Ingram · Thu, Sep 06 2012 15:45:46

A couple of highlights from the interview:

Blogging has been declared dead at least five times. But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.

And from the avid photographer who goes by @photomatt in his social media life:

One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface. WordPress, it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR … but that doesn’t work on a phone.

Here’s the full 20-minute video:

And here’s Mullenweg’s take.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

Speaking at the paidContent 2012 event on Wednesday, Mullenweg said that he had been hard at work coming up with a new interface that will eradicate some of the complexity that WordPress is usually associated with.

“One of the things I’ve been working on for the past few months is a radical simplification of the interface,” he told interviewer Anil Dash. “WordPress it’s a complex tool, it’s like the back of a digital SLR… but that doesn’t work on a phone.”

That complexity has become one of the reasons it is used by a wide range of different people, from tiny bloggers to The New York Times, and is now reported to be the system behind one in eight sites on the web. But Mullenweg admitted it would be tough to move the company in a completely new direction, given the scale and takeup that WordPress already has.

“We’re doing that, but at the same time we’ve got tens of millions of users who love the other thing,” he said. “WordPress is really on its third or fourth major pivot. It’s easy to pivot if things are going badly, but when it’s going well you have the weight of all your existing users.”

However, he dismissed the idea that the core business of blogging was something that had been undermined by the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and other services.

“Blogging has been declared dead at least five times,” he said. “But that’s like saying creativity is dead, or personal expresion is dead. Ultimately some percentage of the people who get a taste for it through Facebook and Twitter want their own space. And for the most part, that’s a blog.”

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Check out the rest of our coverage of paidContent 2012. Full archived video on livestream (registration required).

Sure, newspaper revenues are tanking and layoffs are happening. And there’s no doubt that there is pain and chaos everywhere else in the industry. Radio, television and magazines — all are facing trying times. But as people say, amidst chaos lies opportunity. Over the past few years, we’ve seen mobile devices like smartphones and tablets explode and the emergence of e-paper, astonishing new screens, global distribution platforms, new payment systems such as Amazon and Apple’s stores, and social amplifiers like Facebook and Twitter. We are in the forest after a downpour, and we are ready for new ideas to mushroom.

I admit there are more questions than answers at this point, but these questions are the raw material we can use to write a better script for tomorrow’s content business. These threats and, more importantly, opportunities will be part of the discourse at paidContent 2012, which will be held on May 23, 2012, at the TimesCenter in New York City.

Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

In conversations with industry leaders such as Bob Saureberg of Conde Nast, Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures (an investor in revolutionary companies such as Kickstarter and Twitter) and Amy Banse of Comcast, conference chair and paidContent editor Staci Kramer — along with GigaOM senior writer Mathew Ingram — will ponder the future of the business. No surprise, Staci has labeled this conference: At the crossroads. Here is the schedule. (Click here to register.)

Other speakers at the event include Vivian Schiller of NBC News, Lisa Gersh of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Jon Miller of News Corp., John Borthwick of Betaworks, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress/Automattic and Anil Dash of Expert Labs. Read the full list of speakers here.

I am looking forward to this event and figuring out the future of the industry I love so much.

The pairing: It’s not quite the last one you might imagine but there’s nothing obvious about Wolf and Dash partnering — unless you realize they both know entrepreneur Jack Hidary. Wolf is on the board of Hidary’s iAmplify.com; Dash and Hidary are both involved in mixing technology with government and non-profit activism. When he heard Wolf wanted his new firm to focus on technology along with entertainment/media and communications, he played matchmaker.

The anti-McKinsey: “Consultants in the past were fear consultants,” Dash explained during a joint phone interview. “The model of the McKinsey’s of the world is not that interesting from an innovator’s standpoint.” Wolf called it “dramatically different” when I reminded him that people often perceived hiring him and his former firms as a precursor to cost slashing. They say they’re entering the field at a time when companies have already been cutting costs and now, in consultant-speak, want to help companies drive change, create new strategies and transform themselves. In boutique consultant-speak, Wolf describes it as “the things a large consulting firm can’t do. It’s helping companies rapidly prototype new ideas. It’s being able to take a piece of equity in return for the help and working with venture capital and private equity firms. It’s also focused entirely on growth.”

Activate is based in New York, where the two both live, but they hope to open an office in Silicon Valley later this year. (Maybe they can time share with Quincy Smith’s Code Advisors.) Wolf says they have clients but won’t make them public.

Wolf hasn’t exactly been laying low since his unexpected departure from MTVN in early 2007 but a lengthy non-compete that expired last fall kept him largely focused on serving on boards like iAmplify or Max Levchin’s Slide and participating in various conferences or high-profile events like Davos. (We were on a panel together at the NBA Tech Summit earlier this month.)

Dash was the first employee at blogging platform Six Apart, Ltd., leaving as chief evangelist to be founding director for Expert Labs, an independent non-profit creating web technology “to help the U.S. government tap into the expertise of the public.” He’ll continue that work as well.