Do you think a Microsoft or a Yahoo will launch a competing product? I’m pretty sure they all are about to launch something like this, but we can’t pay too much attention to that. Focus is a really, really, really big deal. Even Google stumbles on the focus issue.

Because if you’re in Google, you could be working on the next big thing, but it’s not as important as search and advertising, and it never will be.

Have you had to do anything differently since the economic crisis hit? The nice thing is, we’re at a level of usage and traffic now that—I’m pretty confident that if we had to, we could pay the bills by doing the lame things, like advertising. But I’m trying to manage things now so we’re not in a position in which we have to raise money in 2009.

And so you feel like you have to bring in some revenue by midyear 2009? Yeah, probably sooner. We’re looking at the first quarter. But if we think it’ll work out better if we delay that and build a more full-featured product, then we’ll do that.

During the terrorist attacks in India in November, Twitter became a news outlet. People were learning about the attacks instantly from others who were twittering about them. What are your thoughts on that? We had an interesting debate internally, because we were being told that the Indian government was asking us to shut down Twitter search and all these users.

Were they actually? They weren’t. I don’t think they were tuned into Twitter—they had bigger problems on their minds. But there was the notion that people were getting information via Twitter, and that the terrorists were getting information via Twitter, and it was putting people in danger. The thing that I asked is, Why would you assume that more information flow is better for the bad guys than the good guys?

Do you find that Twitter is generational, just used by younger people? No, not at all. It’s funny, because so often I get, “Oh, I must be too old, because I don’t get Twitter.” But the truth is, no one gets Twitter at first. [Laughter.] In fact, our user base probably skews older than most people think, because younger people, especially college-age people, are completely absorbed by Facebook, and to them Twitter seems redundant.

Is there a person who’s been identified as having the most followers? Yeah, Barack Obama.