New Twitter HQ Shows Big Ambitions, Rooftop Garden

Twitter didn't just launch a major new redesign Thursday — the event also served as an unveiling of sorts for its next headquarters in San Francisco.

Like the redesigned service — part of an aggressive push to make Twitter the dominant communication tool for people from all walks of life worldwide — the new space suggests a company with grand ambitions.

Surrounded by bare concrete walls and exposed pipe in a historic Art Deco San Francisco building that will become the new Twitter headquarters in June, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and CEO Dick Costolo sold an optimistic plan to make the service simpler for users.

"We can — and have an obligation to — reach every person on the planet," Costolo said.

Dorsey was equally bullish in his portrayal of the company's present and future.

"This is the new URL," he said, referring to the @ monikers that identify users and brands on Twitter.

Satya Patel, Twitter's vp-product, said the company aims to "offer simplicity in a world of complexity" as other social networks add more layers to their services.

The microblogging company's ambitions appeared anything but small. In presenting the new user experience and reinforcing Twitter's 140-character posting limit — which they said will remain a staple — executives flashed big-screen pictures of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Neil Armstrong, alongside legendary quotes that contain fewer than 140 characters.

To help facilitate that increased reach and ambition, Twitter will move into its new headquarters, located in a downtrodden stretch of Market Street, in six months. The space offers 215,000 square feet and the company said it plans to increase its overall workforce from the current 700 people to some 3,000 within the next few years.

Renderings on display at Thursday's presentation showed plans to remove part of the historic structure's roof to install a rooftop garden.

In addition to the new San Francisco headquarters, Twitter also operates sales and engineering offices in New York, London and Tokyo, with plans to further expand worldwide, company official said on Thursday.

San Francisco officials hope Twitter's presence in a beleaguered sector of downtown will help to revitalize the area. Earlier this year, Twitter threatened to move its base office south into the heart of Silicon Valley unless San Francisco gave it a significant tax break. City officials granted Twitter a six-year tax break on new employees in April, and Twitter signed its lease days later. Twitter executives said at the time that the break is essential to allowing the company to mature in a strong and sustainable way.

Dorsey presented the new user interface as "the first step" in facilitating that maturation and setting the service apart from its competitors. Users "just have to share a username or hashtag" to connect, he said. Unlike other social networks, Dorsey added, Twitter is available on the cheapest devices worldwide to make it accessible and useful for people from San Francisco to Baghdad.

As Twitter prepares to expand its global influence, assisted by the new interface, the company will do so from a prominent new central command. The bare concrete walls and exposed piping will become an office with engineering infrastructure and employee perks like the swanky rooftop garden, and Twitter executives expect to crystallize their company as a dominant means of global communication.

"We're going to need all this space," Costolo said, "to scale the company to support the growth of the product."