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By Caroline McCarthy, 4 June 2009 09:11

NEWS

Twitter executive Jack Dorsey says he's looking forward to the day when the world stops talking so much about the company he co-founded.

"I think Twitter [will be] a success for us when people stop talking about it, when we stop doing these panels and people just use it as a utility, use it like electricity," said Dorsey, who was on a Future of Media panel on Wednesday as part of Internet Week New York. "It fades into the background, something that's just a part of communication. We put it on the same level as any communication device. So, email, SMS, phone. That's where we want to be."

But Dorsey, who served as the company's CEO until he stepped down last October (retaining his chairman post), did say he isn't tired of people asking him what Twitter's business model will ultimately be - a persistent nag among pundits who are sceptical of how fast it's risen without a clear way of making money. He said the reason why Twitter hasn't come up with a business model yet is because the company needed to let users and developers shape it first.

"I like that question because it speaks to how Twitter came to be," Dorsey said. Many features of Twitter were "behaviour(s) that we did not invent. That was usage that we saw, that we made easier. The hash tags that you're seeing today, same thing. The search engine was something that was outside the company".

It's sort of a Catch-22, if Dorsey is to be believed: Had Twitter rushed in with a moneymaking strategy early on, it could have hampered the company's growth. "We took VC money so that we can be patient in that endeavour, and we're going to be patient, we're going to do it right," he insisted. "We're not going to put something on top of it that doesn't fit."