Biz Stone On Katie Couric's Webshow (VIDEO): Twitter Co-Founder Compares Twitter To Ice Cream

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone fielded questions from Katie Couric and Twitter users during a live interview on Couric's "webshow" earlier this week.

Stone was asked how Twitter chose 140 characters, why the company rejected Facebook's offer, and whether it's true Twitter will be decreasing the character limit from 140 to 90 (it's not). Couric also got personal with the techie, asking him whether it was true he had read every Sherlock Holmes book written.

Twitter-haters who complain the site is full of mundane chatter may be interested in Stone's lighthearted defense of the micro-blog:

After showing the initial Twitter prototype to friends, Stone says the "overwhelming reaction from folks was "It's a lot of fun."

He goes on to explain,

At first for us it was just about a lot of fun. In fact, some early critics of Twitter said, 'Twitter is not useful,' to which Evan [Williams], my co-founder, replied, 'Well neither is ice cream. Should we ban ice cream? Ban all joy and stop working on Twitter? Absolutely not. We were having fun working on it.

Stone also offered his take on the ongoing "tweeted" vs. "twittered" lexical debate:

Well, for years, I always [said]...the word is Twitter. You can look it up in the dictionary. Theverb is twittering. It's what birds do in the trees. But what happened was people just really fell in love [with] "tweeting:" "I tweeted that, did you see my tweet." And so, I think I'm going now have to relinquish style control here to the people who have spoken and and go ahead and say, it's tweeted.

WATCH: (via CBS)

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