On Monday, the social media giant announced that Evan Williams will step down as the company’s CEO. Williams will focus his efforts on “product strategy,” while Twitter’s COO, Dick Costolo, will take over as CEO. Costolo, founder of FeedBurner, is known as a tech entrepreneur and overall business type.
Many industry insiders see this as Twitter finally making a move toward having a profitable business plan, a move that started at last year’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. There, Williams stated that the company wanted to focus on further developing their product rather than a business model. After several months of doing just that, Twitter’s next move came in April with its first advertising model and the release of “Promoted Tweets.” Since then the concept has broadened into “Promoted Accounts.” Twitter explains how these accounts are custom-selected for each user

“Promoted Accounts are suggested based on a user’s public list of whom they follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm looks at that account’s followers and determines other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts, but not the advertiser’s account, then Twitter may recommend the advertiser’s Promoted Account to that user. For example, a lot of people who follow several gaming-related accounts also follow @xbox. If someone follows gaming-related accounts, but not @xbox, Twitter may recommend @xbox to that person.”

Promoted Accounts are just one feature that will be more accessible with Twitter’s new format of their web interface. The new layout also allows users to browse trending topics, @mentions, retweets, searches, and lists all in a new, wider right-hand column. The new right-hand column can also be used to view photos and videos from partners like TwitPic, Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube as seen in this video.

What does this mean for Twitter’s over 100 million users worldwide? Many suspected were terrified that Twitter would start charging for their services across the board. However, Twitter knows they face alienating their users should they choose to do so. Kevin Thau, Twitter’s head of mobile business development stated that Twitter is developing a range of analytics and metrics products and services built around the information contained in “tweets,” the e-mail and text messages that pass through its platform. “We can measure the tweets,” he says. “We’re trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those.” So go ahead, Twitterheads, breath that sigh of relief, you wont have to shell out any cash in the near future to keep tweeting. The way I see it, this move by Twitter will lead to more dynamic content, ease of sharing, and a new way to find connections not available with the older layout. What do you think?