text: Mr. McCue of Flipboard says Twitter and its C.E.O. are pushing the traditional limits of what it means to be a company that delivers media to people. It is neither a technology company nor a media company, he says. 
   
   “Twitter is an entirely new thing,” Mr. McCue says. “I like the fact that Twitter is unapologetic to that. Dick is the same way with his decisions.” 
   
   Twitter has defended the privacy of its users. It has taken on New York City courts to protect the identities of Occupy Wall Street protesters, and gone up against the United States Justice Department, which tried to gain information about WikiLeaks supporters. 
   
   “No one wants a pen that’s going to rat them out,” says Alexander Macgillivray, Twitter’s chief lawyer. “We all want pens that can be used to write anything, and that will stand up for who we are.” 
   
   IN Twitter’s early days, Mr. Stone, nicknamed Biz, said this of the company’s growth: “It’s like we’re on a rocket ship that we were just painting, and suddenly it took off and we’re holding onto the ship with our fingernails.” 
   
   Nowadays, Mr. Costolo is the one trying to steer that rocket. 
   
   He didn’t plan to end up at Twitter. In 2009, Mr. Costolo and his wife, Lorin, and their two children grew tired of Chicago’s weather and decided to move to California. He started at Twitter as chief operations officer and became chief executive in 2010, after Mr. Williams, one of the Twitter co-founders, stepped down to focus on other projects. Mr. Williams, who is still on Twitter’s board, and Mr. Stone now run Obvious, a start-up incubator. 
   
   Last year, Mr. Costolo brought back Mr. Dorsey, who left the company in 2008 after he struggled to fix engineering problems that knocked Twitter offline for hours at a time. Such problems still occasionally plague the service. 
   
   Mr. Dorsey’s role has since been reduced after employees complained that he was difficult to work with and repeatedly changed his mind about product directions. He no longer has anyone directly reporting to him, although he is still involved in strategic decisions. 
   
   Mr. Dorsey declined to comment on how people feel about working with him. But, in a statement, he said he considered Mr. Costolo to be one of Twitter’s founders. “He’s had a dramatic impact on the company and the culture,” Mr. Dorsey said. “He’s questioned everything we started with and made it better.” 
   
   Mr. Costolo says he looks to Mr. Dorsey for ideas and sometimes has to pull them out of him. Although Mr. Dorsey is a regular on the media circuit, appearing on CNN, as well as “Charlie Rose” and other programs, he tends to be quiet in meetings. 
   
   “Dick does a good job of saying ‘Jack, what do you think?’ ” says Michael Sippey, director of consumer product at Twitter. Mr. Sippey works with Mr. Dorsey to make sure that new features are “Twittery.” 
   
   Mr. Costolo’s quick decision-making can be both good for a company that is growing so quickly, but bad for people who move more slowly than him. Employees say he can come across as insensitive. Earlier this year, for example, he ousted a senior employee over the phone to save time. He has also pushed some stockholders off the board. 
   
   Mr. Costolo has also evicted some third-party applications from Twitter, a decision that some see as insensitive to early adopters who helped the company grow. 
   
   “The techno-enthusiasts that helped Twitter grow are far less valuable to them today,” says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner. “It’s the same way that Apple now cares more about the 10 million consumers than catering to the 10,000 hard-core consumers.” 
   
   When Mr. Costolo doesn’t get his way, he tends to bang his fingers on a tablet as if he’s playing an imaginary piano that won’t make any sounds. Even so, his work ethic — and comedy — have come to permeate Twitter’s culture. ||||| Twitter Mulls an In-House Video-Hosting Service 
   
   If you want something done right, do it yourself. 
   
   Twitter is considering building its own video-hosting technology, according to sources. That means users could upload video directly via the service’s mobile apps, instead of using hosting services like yFrog, TwitVid and Vodpod. 
   
   That potential change would be in line with a number of tweaks the site has made to its applications throughout 2012. Until recently, Twitter also delegated photo hosting to third-party services; Twitter moved that hosting in-house with the most recent app updates. 
   
   Mind you, this doesn’t mean Twitter expects users to start using its homegrown solution for the bulk of the videos people share of the service. It still expects most people to post clips using links from sites like YouTube, Hulu and Vimeo. 
   
   People familiar with Twitter’s thinking say the switch would be a way of further refining Twitter’s consistency and user experience, better shaping how users encounter Twitter content. It’s Twitter’s theme over the past year. (Example: The LinkedIn situation from months ago.) 
   
   While these video services take some of the heavy lifting off of Twitter, they also create difficulties. For one, Twitter has no control over the changes others make to their products. Yet often, Twitter must deal with the fallout when these changes occur. So, say, a third-party Twitter developer screws something up for its users — those users don’t necessarily go to the developer with complaints, but instead take it directly to Twitter. 
   
   I’d imagine, too, that every time Twitter updates one of its clients, it is frustrating to configure the new version to work with a number of outside hosting services. Add in the fact that Twitter has clients across multiple operating systems, and it fast becomes a logistical headache. 
   
   It’s not only about tech problems, but creating better ways to make tweets richer. Over the past few months, Twitter has slowly, increasingly updated the product to be more media-friendly, with full photos, videos and snippets of news articles now viewable from within individual tweets themselves. 
   
   Owning that rich video experience has monetization upside. One source says building a more effective video player could be a way of better enhancing the company’s existing advertising products, namely the promoted suite. 
   
   Look at it this way: If a big brand buys a promoted tweet, the advertiser needs to make that tweet as compelling as possible to get their money’s worth. The better the tweet, the higher the likelihood of click-through or, at minimum, brand awareness. A simpler, more reliable way for partners to host their video makes for a better, media-rich stream. In theory, it’s good for both users and advertisers. 
   
   Who it’s not so good for: These third-party hosting services. Were Twitter to follow through with the plan, this would seriously dampen the number of video uploads these services would receive. Users could still upload video to these third-party services and then add the link in manually, but the loss of official Twitter app integration would sting. 
   
   As of today, it’s not a done deal; Folks inside the company are still hashing out whether to make the change. But if it were to come about, I’d expect it to come quietly in a future product update. 
   
   (Image courtesy of Juan Manuel Romo)
target: – Twitter is looking into the idea of developing its own video hosting capabilities, so users won't have to turn to third-party services like yFrog, TwitVid, or Vodpod to share their videos with the world, sources tell All Things Digital. While Twitter still expects most users to upload their videos on services like YouTube or Vimeo, it thinks offering its homegrown option will help refine Twitter's user experience. Meanwhile, Twitter co-founder and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey confirmed that he'd taken a step back from his operational role in the company, but denied a New York Times report that it was because "employees complained that he was difficult to work with." In a Tumblr post, Dorsey said he stepped back because he wanted to spend "the majority of my time with Square, where I'm CEO."