Five Things You Didn't Know About Twitter

CNBC content available by kind permission of CNBC

By: Eli Langer Social Media Producer

In a recent interview with CNBC, Costolo responded to some questions posed by CNBC's Twitter followers.

Here are five questions asked by CNBC's Twitter followers that led Costolo to shine some light on what's next for the social media giant.

1) Does Twitter sell the data it collects?

"No, we're not" said Costolo.

So, what does Twitter do with data collected?

Costolo said the company uses "data in a lot of different ways to understand — for example, to debug problems. When you've got that many hundreds of millions of tweets coming in per day, sometimes we get a very specific kind of detailed bug and you'll have to dig back through the data you've collected over the past couple months to try to debug it."

2) Why do millions of people flock to Twitter each day?

"Forty percent of our users now don't actively Tweet," Costolo said. What are they doing then? "They log in and just consume information. I think that number will continue to grow as we become evermore mainstream."

3) User status on its way?

Remember AIM Away Messages? These short and customizable notes were posted on Buddy Lists in the 1990s to alert a person's friends if he or she was online, away or simply hard at work. The question for Twitter is: should users look forward to a status feature indicating when a subscriber is online, available, busy, etc?

"I don't think we'll do that any time soon," answers Costolo. Cue AOL door slam audio.

4) What happens to unused Twitter handles?

New users may find it frustrating when they realize someone already registered a Twitter handle with their name. Even more frustrating, accounts made up of precious handles may be going unused and collecting dust.

When asked if users will have access to these inactive names, Costolo said it will be possible soon, but in an "automated fashion."

5) What is Twitter doing to combat spam?

"Spam is an arms race. It always is between the technologies trying to prevent it and the spammers trying to work their way around it," Costolo said. "Spammers work where they think there are hundreds of millions people paying attention because that's where they know that they can try to have their message seen. We have an incredible technology team working to eradicate it from the platform. And the data actually show that they're doing a fantastic job."

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Source - CNBC.com