The idea of Twitter started with me working in dispatch since I was 15 years old, where taxi cabs or firetrucks would broadcast where they were and what they were doing.
I fell in love with flora of all types, especially ferns. Loved the sparse structure and repetition of shape - almost fractal.
Twitter was around communication and visualizing what was happening in the world in real-time. Square was allowing everyone to accept the form of payment people have in their pocket today, which is a credit card.
Anything you're interested in the world - whether it be Charlie Rose or JetBlue or a public figure or your local coffee shop - they're on Twitter and broadcasting what is interesting to them.
My goal is to simplify complexity. I just want to build stuff that really simplifies our base human interaction.
The interesting products out on the Internet today are not building new technologies. They're combining technologies. Instagram, for instance: Photos plus geolocation plus filters. Foursquare: restaurant reviews plus check-ins plus geo.
I am someone who tweets about what I have for breakfast, what I have for lunch, what I have for dinner, and for 99.99999 percent of the world, it's useless. It's meaningless. But for my mother, she loves it.
I loved couriers. You had this transfer of physical information happening throughout the city and the world. Someone picking up the package, putting it in a bag, going somewhere, taking it out of the bag, giving it to someone else. I thought that was so cool. I wanted to map it, to see that flow on a big screen.
I was fascinated with jeans, because you can impress your life upon the jeans you wear. The way you sit imprints on the jeans.
You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That's the value, not the brand 'Twitter.' Twitter just provides the venue for it.
The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what's going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn't allow for that.
I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. You have these augmented realities like Foursquare and Twitter and Facebook that provide these virtual nodes and instant feedback from anywhere, adding annotation around a physical places.
It's a matter of invitations versus context. Twitter is really good at providing context, like, I'm having coffee at Third Rail Coffee.' Foursquare is about invitations to places. In this respect Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me.
I think Twitter is the future of communications and Square will be the payment network.
A number of people in the United States, almost everyone, is using plastic cards to pay for things, but it's extremely difficult to accept these cards. So let's make it's easy and take more and more of the friction out as we can.
People who are using it to sell things on Craigslist to holding garage sales - campaigns - the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign both used Square to raise funds.
When people come to Twitter and they want to express something in the world, the technology fades away. It's them writing a simple message and them knowing that people are going to see it.
What I love about New York is just the electricity I feel right away.
Twitter has been my life's work in many senses. It started with a fascination with cities and how they work, and what's going on in them right now.
The first complaint we hear from everyone is: 'Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother's eating for lunch?' But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled - you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share.
