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.

  As for the recently announced Google Knol project, Anil says that just like with Google Page Creator, Blogger, Google Notebook, JotSpot, Google Docs and other tools, “Google has not proven that it understands content creation and publishing as well as it understands its core businesses of search and advertising.” In response, Jason Goldman, who worked at Google and is now at Twitter, says:

The screenshot [of Knol] shows something kinda like a Wikipedia article except it has ads by Google, peer reviews and prominent author attribution.

On the first point, a big reason this is happening is because of the amount of unmonetizable traffic Google sends to Wikipedia. … And Wikipedia won’t accept advertising. Let’s build Knol.

The further justification for Knol is “Who can trust all that crap on Wikipeda?” Google is fundamentally an academic institution and part of that ethos is that things aren’t really “good” unless peer reviewed. The concept of peer review is central to how work is done inside Google and that basically works as far as it goes. Unfortunately, that ethos has extended to the way Google views content on the web. Sergey once asked the Blogger team how Blogger was going to compete with the New York Times. Even though our pageviews exceeded those of the NYT, the point I think he was making was “When are you gonna produce something authoritative that lots of people will accept as good.” Blogger’s answer was “Huh?” Knol’s answer is peer review.

Jason adds, “The fact that the [Knol] article in the released screenshot was authored by a Stanford University academic is basically all you need to know about how Google views content on the web. It doesn’t count as knowledge until it’s given to you by an expert.”

Then again, PageRank too came about partly due to this ethos of accepting peer reviews as quality measurement; instead of counting article citations, back in the 1990s Google went about to count backlinks to measure the credibility of an article. Then again (again), PageRank was based on the open structure of the web, analyzing external data. This time, Google is shifting the model to its own servers by hosting all Knol data, along with the peer reviews & ratings for that data.

In related news, I recently emailed the domain owner of Knol.com, Hilco Knol, to ask if Google contacted him in regards to acquiring the domain. The site of this Dutch cleaning devices seller gained quite some traffic recently and chose to thank “Google”, “040 Hosting” and “TechCrunch,” among others, on their homepage. Interestingly enough, Hilco told me the following:

Till now have google don’t take contact with us we are positif suprised for using the name KNOL because it is my own name.

We want to launch our own products what you can see on our knol.com Internet site.

For the rest we see whats happening.

[Thanks Anil!]

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