Earlier this month, Stone posted an update on what the company is doing at the company, which originally incubated Twitter itself. At the time, he said they had signed up their first “Obvious Entrepreneur”.

Now, Stone writes,”It’s important never to delude ourselves into thinking that technology changes the world. People are responsible for change—technology just helps out. At Obvious, our goal is to foster systems that help people work together to improve the world. Our approach is threefold: Build, partner, and invest. We’ve started working on some ideas ourselves, we’re researching how best to create an investment vehicle, and today we’re thrilled to announce our first official partnership.”

“Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby have created an interesting new application for unlocking human potential through positive reinforcement,” he adds. “We love this software for what it does, and because we’ve tried it and it works. Our plan is to build something extraordinary together. The Obvious Corporation will assist the talented Lift team with strategy, design, funding, recruiting—in general, we’ll be helpful wherever possible. In exchange, Obvious will own some equity in Lift.”

Not much has been revealed about Lift so far, but Stone says that will change soon.

Unfortunately, the Lift site at lift.do isn’t much help in the details department either. It just indicates that it’s invite-only right now and you can give them your email to get updates as they become available.

Once you sign up, you’ll be send an email from Stubblebine, which says:

Hey there, thanks for signing up for the Lift Beta!

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb was able to dig up a little bit about Lift, in that it was previously called Mibbles, and at that point, he says, “users joined multiple groups with names like Happydog (as in “I want to keep my dog happy”), Love or Home. Then they gave themselves Awards when they achieved accomplishment leading towards the goals they were grouped around.”

“It sounds like Twitter in its simplicity and from what I’ve seen it looks a lot like Twitter too – but with more structure,” he writes.

Whatever Lift turns out to be in its usable form, there’s no indication of when it will actually be available.

Now, Biz Stone, the other co-founder, has announced that he too is stepping back (not completely away) from Twitter.

Stone and Williams are trying their hands at a new (or resurrected rather) startup called Obvious, along with former Twitter VP of Product, Jason Goldman. Here’s what it says on the Obvious site:

The Obvious Corporation makes systems that help people work together to improve the world. The proliferation of technology can seem superfluous, but with the right approach, technology can benefit individuals, organizations, and society. We are relaunching the company that originally incubated Twitter with a high level of commitment to making a difference and developing products that matter.

In more than a decade of developing large scale systems on the Internet, we’ve never been more excited than right now. The possibility to reach and connect expansive numbers of people fundamentally changes the nature of what’s possible when it comes to building businesses on the Internet. Also, there’s room for innovation in how businesses measure success and more meaningful definitions of ambition.

Stone, Williams, and Goldman all used to work on Google’s Blogger team. Then, Williams left, and the other followed him into Obvious, and eventually Twitter was born. Now, it seems that they’re going back to where they can make new things, rather than work on their creation that proved to be a succes, which is now largely in the hands of its other co-founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo (also formerly of Google).

On his personal blog, Stone writes:

My work on Twitter has spanned more than half a decade and I will continue to work with the company for many years to come. During this time—especially lately, it has come to my attention that the Twitter crew and its leadership team have grown incredibly productive. I’ve decided that the most effective use of my time is to get out of the way until I’m called upon to be of some specific use.

As for the bulk of my time day-to-day, I’m thrilled to announce that Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and myself will be relaunching The Obvious Corporation as co-founders. Our plan is to develop new projects and work on solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement: The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!

When Williams stepped down from Twitter, he also noted that he would remain on the Board of Directors, so it appears both he and Stone will still remain close to Twitter, just not as hands on as they once were.

Morgan had co-founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey on, along with other guests including Martha Stewart, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Alyssa Milano, journalist Nick Kristof, the Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Rosman, and social media wine guy Gary Vaynerchuk.

Unfortunately, there was no juicy company-related news or any discussion about the new change in leadership. That’s not to say it was a bad show. It did provide an interesting look at how Twitter was intended, what it has turned into, and how it is used in different ways, from tweeting mundane things, to preventing brutality, raising money for causes, etc.

Some quotes from new Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey:

“It’s extremely humbling to see how quickly the velocity of the service – how it’s taken off.” (note: Dorsey seems to use the words “humbling” and “velocity” a lot.)

“Early on we knew how engaging it was and how magical it felt, but had no idea what the users would do with it.”

“It’s always been focused on the recipient. You can write something and it goes out to the world, and people choose to follow it or not….They follow their interests, what they’re passionate about, and then they talk about it on the service with their friends.”

“The amazing thing is it depends on the content. There was a man in a boat in the Hudson River. He had 20 followers. A plane landed in the Hudson, he took a picture, and suddenly he was in the national conversation within a minute. So it’s not so dependent on the followers The followers certainly help direct attention, but it really depends on the content and what you’re sharing with the world.”

On mayoral use of Twitter: “It’s amazing what people are doing with it, and they redefine the service every single tweet.”

Years ago, you may recall that the biggest Twitter-related topic of discussion was about what it is for. Interesting to see now that this is still being discussed, and that getting people to figure it out is still one of the main goals for Dorsey.

When asked, “Should you drink and tweet?” Biz Stone said, “Absolutely not.” Dorsey concurred.

The subject of Evan Williams did not come up. Square came up briefly at the end of the show as a simple, quick plug.

Williams made a post on his personal blog this evening, discussing his plans in no great detail. The plans do, however, include staying at Twitter as a board member. Willimas wrote:

After stepping down from CEO six months ago, my mind started to wander. The reason I left Blogger/Google when I did is that I felt it had reached a place where it was on solid ground and in capable hands (at the time, Jason Goldman’s as product manager). Though still an independent company, I realized Twitter may be at a similar point today. So, as was reported in various places yesterday, I’ve decided to scale back my role at the company. (I’m still involved, but it’s no longer my full-time job.)

I’m not ready to talk about what I have planned next, but I will venture a prediction about what’s next for Twitter: It will be bigger and better.

…

First of all, I’m not disappearing from Twitter. I remain on the board of directors and will frequently meet with many folks there to help in any way I can.

However, now that Twitter is in capable hands that aren’t mine, it’s time to pick up a whiteboard marker and think fresh. There are other problems/opportunities in the world that need attention, and there are other individuals I’d love to get the opportunity to work with and learn from. (Details to come.)

Jack Dorsey is appearing along with co-founder Biz Stone on CNN’s Piers Morgan tonight. More on that to come. Here’s what Dorsey talked about at Columbia University.

It’s an interesting move, and one that many have been questioning. Can he successfully do both at the same time? They both seem like full time jobs, but evidently Dorsey feels pretty good about it. Square investors? That might be a different story. Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider reports: “Last night, one of Square’s top investors, Sequoia partner Roelof Botha tweeted, “To do two things at once is to do neither. – Publilius Syrus. Then Botha deleted the tweet.”

Note: The above tweet was in reference to another Sequoia-backed service – the much talked about Color, but it seemed appropriate to bring the point up again. For further context, know that Sequoia has provided funding for Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, YouTube, LinkedIn, Cisco, NVIDIA, Yahoo, Kayak, and Zappos, to name a few.

There are plenty of questions surrounding Dorsey’s return. For one, what does it mean for fellow Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who has apparently spending less and less time actually dealing with Twitter, since he turned the CEO reins over to Dick Costolo last year. Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch shares the following statement, obtained directly from Twitter:

Ev decided a couple months ago to be less involved day to day at Twitter. He continues to have a close relationship with the company providing strategic advice and, of course, he remains an active board member.

Meanwhile, Williams is reportedly considering a new startup, and as previously noted, has (along with other Twitter co-founder Biz Stone) yet to tweet about Dorsey’s return to the company as many other Twitterers have welcomed him back with open arms.

Even as Dorsey takes on a new/reprised role at Twitter, he hasn’t slowed down on the Square promotion so far:

According to Biz Stone, the names that were initially kicked around were, "Jitter" and "Twitch", but those seem to much like a "drug addict". They wanted a name that depicted speed/urgency, so they happened to look in a thesaurus and Twitter was mentioned along with the other possible names… and the rest, as they say, is history. (You can watch the interview for yourself below)

Do you think Twitter would be as popular with a name like "Jitter" or "Twitch"? Tell us what you think.

Williams explained the change on the Twitter Blog, writing, "I am most satisfied while pushing product direction.  Building things is my passion, and I’ve never been more excited or optimistic about what we have to build. . . .  This is why I have decided to ask our COO, Dick Costolo, to become Twitter’s CEO."

Williams, meanwhile, intends to focus on product strategy.

Want to know more about Costolo?  Here’s his LinkedIn profile, and Williams wrote, "During his year at Twitter, he has been a critical leader in devising and executing our revenue efforts, while simultaneously and effectively making the trains run on time in the office."

Also, for whatever it’s worth, Costolo’s famous (in some circles) for his sense of humor, having once worked as a comedian.

On that note, here’s the rather ironic screen we encountered when trying to look up Twitter’s new CEO minutes ago:

Do you think the redesign will get more people using Twitter? Share your thoughts.

 

Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site.  

Making Twitter more appealing to the mainstream means greater value for businesses and marketers.

Either way, I’ll be liveblogging the keynote below. Please forgive the inevitable typos.

Williams will be interviewed by Umair Haque of the Havas Media Lab."

Liveblogging starts

02:00:  Still waiting…

02:01: Introduction beginning…

02:03: Here we go…

Evan Williams announces…A new platform for integrating twitter into websites: it’s called @anywhere

Signin using twitter id, your own publications can be followed starting with amazon,huffpost youtube yahoo,….a bunch of others.

Umair asks – if i’m at newspaper and i want to read one of fav columnits

ev: @anywhere reduces friction – not strict rules lleaves alot of innovation up to devs and third parties…a lot to be done with it

easily tweet from column itself. you may just want to follow the columlnist….straight from byline

"one of the things we’ve found with twitter is discovery is one of the hardest challenges…"

twitter is very easy way to keep in touch.

Umair: what are key benefits to site?

ev: give you connection back to users that you didn’t hav before – twitter drives tons of traffic, so should reslt in more followers for a site than just sending out links…

hopefully result in more people who are your fans using twitter, talking about you content…

you can bring in users’ tweets into your site, and create a sub community with it

Umair: people and organizations build stronger relationships?

about lowering barrier to that according to Ev.

03:13: Ev: We’re still focused pretty much on how do we create the best experience for users and businesses…

How do we create a business out of this? There’s tons of business users on twitter today..

We just want to make that better, easier, and faster.

What is Twitter? Maybe the right question is what is twitter evolving to?

It’s always been a difficult question to answer. We think of it as an information network to help people discover what they care about (in the world)

You can follow the flaming lips if that’s what you care about….you can be smarter and make better choices…that’s valuable…

its like saying "what’s the internet?" it’s about who you are. what you need at the time.

02:16. As we grow, one of the things that becomes painful is having a lot of centralized decision making and forcing poeple through slow processes, so we have teams and try to give them the resources they need…

Role for interacting with teams?

I don’t get into the nuts and bolts of code…I personally like to get inovled in product and strategy…what we should be doing…the nitty gritty, work wth product teams. half my time. the other half think about company and right culture internally…

been thinking a lot lately about how to scale the company and adopt the characteristics we want…how to define these characteristics..paralllel between service and the company we want to create – openness big value of twitter . transparency. a company that behaves by that as well. easy to say and harder to do as you grow…

02:19 Openness means a lot of things. we debated whether openness or transparency is the right word. you can let people see what you’re doing, but a door lets people come in and mess with what you’re doing ..users have taken twitter and morphed it into what they want it to be. ….we’ve encouraged and supported that. a core part of being open.

Your basic assumptions are usually wrong. "Openness is a survival technique."

We talk about nine assumptions you should have one of them is assume there are more smart people outside the compay than inside. it’s a key thing to remember as you get bigger…

  02:21:   Deals with Bing/Google first guys we shared full stream of public twitter data with. a lot of debate…people inside twitter…if there’s all this data that could be highly moentizable., does it make sense to give this data away? We came to the decision by going to the principle by how do we create the most value for the user….the reason google/bing could help that – ther’es valuable knowledge within the twitter network. there’s a lot of valuable tweeting that people don’t necessarily see…it’s a way to bring more valuable to the tweets.

02:24: It was a tough decision to come to….big partners aren’t who they want to limit it too..announced a couple weeks ago that they would license the data to other partners…

One of the exciting next things to happen with the ecosystem …creating core experiences that fill holes in user expereince…sharing photos, shortening links, apps, etc.

Real businesses built off twitter – cotweet,etc. we know twitter can be used for customer support, but twitter.com interface isn’t built for that. cotweet recently got acquired who wants to focus on that more.

We’d love to see much more focus on creating those deep experiences.
 
"We’re pretty open." THere is some control we need to employ. if we were completly open, it could hur the users in time….it has to be managed a lot – being open and having an open api makes it much easier to build apps to spam twiter. sending cease and desists every day to spammers – using the twitter brand…

One reason third parties are so important – a lot of people falling for these guys’ tricks…we have to assert some kind of control.

02:29: An email i recently got…to support – someone in chile thanking twitter for helping communication…this is very gratifying for us because we’ve always held it important to make twitter reach the weakest signals in the world…because twitter’s so simple….sms still really important to us…

We’re really happy we’ve been able to get sms coverage…not as easy as just providing a service on the internet.

02:21: To me it comes back to is someone getting value out of twitter. if they’re search google and they come upon a tweet and get value out of a tweet, we consider them a user…ther is a curve for adoption. "we have a pretty wide definition of user." we’re trying to lower the barrier…at the beginning a lot of focus was on telling the world what you’re doing…now we’re getting to the point where there’s something interesting on twitter for almost everybody…mentions flaming lips again…critical that it’s a two way medium, but this could be as simple as a retweet or a reply…

02:35 Press secretary of the white house started using twitter in an authentic way from inside the white house in a way that you wouldn’t usually see things….official channel, but they’re using it in a new way. "very fun" to see.  It’s about reducing the walls beween people who have a lot of influence and the people they influence. That’s the most profound promise of the Internet, and we’re riding the wave I started on ten years ago with blogging…"

02:41: There’s more and more stuff every day you may want to follow and search for…our goal is not just to maximize that. We understand that people have limited time/attetion. We have no interest in increasing just the amount of time you spend on the Twitter site. "If anything, we’d like to decease it."

The open exchange of info has a positive impact on the world…

02:46: The obvious stuff will be just signing in and tweeting more stuff, but there’s another level of value created by lowering frition (@ platform)

If the channel helps the business get better, that tha’s very powerful.

02:49: If you live on the web, you’re used to having a relationship with companies/services you use..

A lot of people walked out of this keynote. I’m pretty sure the guy next to me fell asleep. No joke.