“I don’t give a sh*t if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures” says Twitter’s co-founder

Yesterday we mentioned that Instagram now has more users than Twitter, and we imagine the folks at Instagram feel that this is a massive accomplishment. Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, doesn’t see it that way – in fact he doesn’t seem to care about how many users Twitter has in comparison.

In an interview with Fortune, Williams questioned why people only ever talk about how many users a service has, a figure he says is abstract and meaningless — particularly because there’s no set definition of how you define someone as a user. Does simply having an account make you a user? Or do you have to use a service for a certain amount of time each month? If so, how much? It’s a minefield.

Williams also made it clear that Twitter and Instagram are two different services with different goals, saying:

“It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this real-time information network where everything in the world happens on Twitter — important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”

Apples to oranges? Sounds more like sour grapes to us.

Williams also claims that Instagram doesn’t make as much money as Twitter. And in the world of business, that matters more than anything else.

Image:  TechCrunch50 Day Two Afternoon – Evan Williams by Brian Solis via Wikimedia Commons