Biz Stone says he hasn't ruled out expanding the company's D.C. presence. Twitter co-founder: Closer D.C. ties

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can count on one hand the number of times he's been to Washington.

Politics, he says, "is not really my thing."


Still, the 36-year-old social networking entrepreneur acknowledged that Twitter's embryonic relationship with Washington is bound to evolve and strengthen given the site's ever-expanding use as a political tool – from facilitating the recent uprisings in the Middle East to helping members of Congress engage constituents.

"Is Washington important to Twitter or is Twitter important to Washington?" Stone said during an interview with POLITICO. "I don't think you have to frame it either way, but I think the point is there are a lot of similarities in the way we think about technology.”

The recent announcement that the State Department will start Twitter accounts in Farsi shows there is a basic agreement that the open flow of information is important, he said.

“I think that’s where the relationship is forged,” he said. "You have all these folks in Washington using Twitter, and they find their own value in [it]. On top of that they're very influential users, so that's also important."

Stone is in town this week to help launch ConvergeUS, a new nonprofit arm of TechNet – a lobbying group that represents high-tech executives – that's designed to bring disparate organizations together to tackle social ills through technology.

"One of the things I'm committed to is this idea that start-ups ... weave into the core of their being doing something good for the world, locally or globally, right from the beginning," Stone said. "So there's this compound interest to altruism, rather than waiting until you have a billion dollars and then starting to give some of it away."

Stone recounted only three times he's set foot in Washington, including a trip last April to introduce himself to members of Congress.

"I just wanted to let them know, you've heard about us around the world but we're not ignoring you. I didn't want two years to go by and then come to them because we needed something," Stone said before slipping into his best Marlon Brando impersonation. "It's like 'The Godfather': 'You never come to visit, and today you ask me to do murder.'"

But at least for now, Twitter's presence in Washington will remain muted. The company has a single employee here – former C-SPAN producer Adam Sharp, who was hired in November. His duties include giving politicians tutorials on how to use Twitter or explaining its privacy policies.

Stone says there are no plans to expand Twitter’s one-man office, but the idea hasn’t been ruled out.

"So far it's just Adam," Stone said. "I would assume (an expansion) would be in the plans eventually, but it's not something we're talking about right now. We have other things we're working on."

During the interview Stone touched on user privacy issues, including law enforcement requests for personal data. Three people under investigation as part of the government’s WikiLeaks probe are fighting the Justice Department’s attempt to obtain personal data from their Twitter accounts.

Stone said the site makes a point to let users know before handing over their private information to the government.

"We have a privacy policy that says we're going to protect your privacy – it's about truth in advertising," he said. "The easiest way to go about it when you have to comply with (law enforcement) is to tell the user, 'These people want your information, it's up to you what to do, but here are public resources you might want to contact.'"

It’s not always that easy. Government officials may ask Twitter not to give a target a heads up.

"All I can say is we really push for the user,” Stone said. “I can't get into the specifics of what we've done."

When asked whether Twitter will ever become as ubiquitous as Facebook, Stone predicted big growth ahead – particularly on cell phones.

But signing up more users isn’t the only goal.

“I’m troubled by the engagement that equals eight hours a day of fat kids staring at a computer,” he said. “I like the kind of engagement that provides information that you want, when and where want it, so you can make better informed decisions about your life. I think that means an aggressive push on mobile around the world. There are large swaths of the world that are skipping the PC Internet and going right to mobile, so what kind of tools can we build for them?”