Twitter's Biz Stone and Ev Williams at AllThingsD

Since the buzz this morning is about the Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD conference interview with Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, it's time for BNET Media to join in the fun. The real action starts about halfway through, unless you're obsessed with the minutiae of why Stone and Wiliams gave V.C. money back to investors who had backed another one of their projects, Odeo, which was a podcasting company. The highlights:

Williams on the value of Twitter's open API (application programming interface for you non-engineers):

It's fabulous for us and users that there are dozens of companies and individual hobbyists competing to create the best Twitter experience possible. Openness is certainly one of the themes of the company and of the product and the API demonstrates that in a very profound way.

What we're doing with search is basically trying to get people different and better ways to filter and discover the content that is within Twitter, first and foremost. No one else is doing that because that's the content that's in Twitter, and we think there's a lot of value there. It's about real-time information discovery; real-time search could be a bunch of different things."

When there's a structured intent, like, "This is what I'm looking for," there's a great opportunity to make introductions, "You are looking for this. Did you know that this is also on Twitter? Or that you can follow this account on Twitter?" ... So there's a huge amount of opportunity in the idea of making introductions, and like Ev said, creating more opportunities for discovery, and certainly, there's probably money there.

The theory is this: there are a lot of commercial users on Twitter today. Lots of big brands use it as a marketing communications and customer service vehicle. Thereare a lot of small businesses using it to just connect with their customers and build relationships, and it fits very well with the model of Twitter because Twitter isn't a social network ... it's an information and dissemination and relationship-building tool."