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Biz Stone talks about Twitter on Read/Write Talk. Although there's a podcast you can listen to, there's also a full transcription. I love it when podcasters do that.

My favorite part is about the API:

Biz Stone: Yeah. The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we’ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas, and build things like Twitterrific, which is just a beautiful elegant way to use Twitter that we wouldn’t have been able to get to, being a very small team.So, the API which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We’ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone’s doing around the world with Twitter. Twitter is popping up from Spain and Japan and United States.And that’s very, sort of like, “Look at that!” It’s like staring at a fish bowl or something – an aquarium. You just find yourself getting lost in it. The API has really been a big success for us, and it’s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward.

I also like this advice to entrepreneurs:

Something we learned when we were working with Odeo was that we weren’t as inspired as we should have been when we worked at Odeo. We weren’t really super into podcasting. I think that was a problem because at the event that we were working on something…where our passion is 100%. I think that ends up showing up in everything that you end up doing.So with Twitter, it was something that we created from scratch and we were super enthusiastic about it. We were using it. Like I said, we were literally giggling when we first started working. We just really enjoyed it and loved it. From that point, it translates to everything you do. It translates with management and it translates to coding.It translates to just sending out…I send out an email every couple of weeks or I try to, to the folks who have signed up on Twitter. And I love sending out email. I love sending “Here’s what we’ve been working on and here’s what’s new and stuff.”

The API has >10x the traffic of twitter.com. That's a great stat and I'd like to find other companies that have that metric working for them.