We have specific goals and objectives for ourselves, and that s how we measure ourselves and think about ourselves… I don t think about that in the context of how it stacks up versus a company A, B, or C.
— Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, in response to an often-asked question about how the company s user base (271 million) is much smaller than Facebook s (1.3 billion). In an interview with Business Insider after Tuesday s earnings call, Costolo talked about the San Francisco company s second-quarter success — its revenue more than doubled and it added 16 million users — and said it was due more to what Twitter is doing with big events and topics rather than the big event (in this case, the World Cup) itself. We built these very specific World Cup experiences. Those timelines that were both for each match where you could see the tweets about the match, the score of the match, the photos from the match, the accounts from the match, and then for the overall World Cup itself, Costolo said.
Twitter shares are up about 20 percent to $46.50, after trading as high as $48 earlier this morning. Twitter, which went public in November and closed at $44.90 is in its first day of trading, had lost $14 billion in market value this year as its shares slumped because of concerns about slow user growth.
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