Evan Williams recently took over the reigns of Twitter. Williams, @ev on Twitter, has a history of founding some fantastic services. Williams has co-founded at least three companies, worked for Google, and has been named in People of the Year in 2004 by PC Magazine and was listed as one of Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. To say he is a leader would be an understatement.

When with Pyra Labs, Williams saw a spin-off product called Blogger come from the company’s project management software. Pyra Labs (and subsequently Blogger) were acquired by Google in 2003. Fast forward to late 2006, when Williams and Biz Stone founded Obvious Corp, and later formed Twitter Inc with Jack Dorsey. When Twitter was started, Williams was the CEO of Obvious, but later handed Twitter’s CEO position over to Dorsey.

Growth, Past and Future

During Jack Dorsey’s tenure as the CEO of Twitter, the company experienced massive growth and some large injections of venture capital. The official announcement says:

“As Twitter grows both internally and externally, we took a good look at our path forward and saw the need for a focused approach from a single leader.”

One thing that is certain is that Twitter needs to think about monetization and how they’re going to make money from this extremely fat cash cow.

Early sketch of Twitter’s UI next to a recent sketch

What’s In Store for Twitter?

Williams is just one of now well over two million registered users at Twitter. Will we see Twitter shift toward monetization, or focus on keeping the service stable? How will this new “focused approach” impact the thousands and thousands of daily Twitter users? Only time will tell.

What are your predictions and expectations from Twitter, keeping this executive change in mind?