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PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT

The Twitter Revolution

Aired March 29, 2011 - 21:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SNOOP DOGG, @SNOOPDOGG, RECORDING ARTIST: I have to follow my old friend Martha Stewart because Martha Stewart, she keeps everybody.

MARTHA STEWART, @MARTHASTEWART, LIFESTYLE ICON: I use Twitter to keep in touch.

HILLARY CLINTON, @STATEDEPT, SECRETARY OF STATE: Countries and cultures are brought together like never before.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: What do Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, Snoop Dogg, Alissa Milano, and I have in common? Along with millions of you?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm using Twitter to send pictures and thoughts from space.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: Tonight, find out what all the Twittering is about. If you're not on it, what are you missing? If you are on it, what you may not know that you ought to know. From farmers to revolution, our generation is tweeting and making history.

Tonight, Twitter queens Martha Stewart and Alissa Milano on Twitter politics. You're invited to be a part of the show with the two guys who invented Twitter.

This is a special live tweeting edition of @Pierstonight.

Good evening. And welcome to a special edition of PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT with our live studio audience. And here with me, two rather special gentlemen who five years ago had the brilliant idea for Twitter. Co-founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey.

(APPLAUSE)

MORGAN: 140 million people a day tweet, and in a short while I'm going to bring in some world-class tweeters. Martha Stewart, there she is, New York Mayor Cory Booker, and "New York Times" columnist Nick Kristof, who's seen firsthand the power of twittering might revolution around the world. And in Los Angeles, actress Alissa Milano who used Twitter to put out some very personal news.

But we begin with perhaps appropriately some breaking news from Nic Robertson. If you're following him, that's NicRobertson -- @NicRobertsonCNN. Today he's been tweeting about the latest events in Libya, and in particular about the Libyan woman who publicly accused pro-Gadhafi forces of raping her. She hasn't been seen since.

Tonight, Nic is live for us in Tripoli.

Nic, I've been following as many people do your updates on Twitter from Libya. But bring us up to date on what is actually happening on the ground today. It seems significant that the rebels in Libya are now being forced back by Gadhafi forces. Is that the story of the day?

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It's the story of the day and even bigger than that I think is the story that Gadhafi's response to the conference in London, to President Obama's speech, is the go on the offensive not just against the rebels in the east, around Bin Jawad, and all that territory they took around the oil fields over the last few days, but also in the town of Misrata where we visited just yesterday, going on the offensive there.

Calls coming from the opposition there saying that his troops are going house to house, forcing them out of houses, more shelling.

Also we've seen shelling here -- coalition bombing at least here in Tripoli in the daylight. That's the first time we've seen that. And reports that we are getting and I'm receiving in the last few hours from Zintan, reports by Twitter telling us -- telling me that Gadhafi is mounting and getting ready to mount a new offensive around Zintan. But we wouldn't know about that if it wasn't for Twitter.

But it certainly -- it fills and conforms with everything else we're hearing about Gadhafi at the moment going on a big offensive -- Piers.

MORGAN: Nic, I mean, fascinating, though, that you yourself on the ground are getting information via Twitter. How important in the whole of these uprisings through the Middle East has social networking been? Not just Twitter but Facebook and other mediums of that type?

ROBERTSON: What we've heard in all these countries is that the people have lost the fear. They did that because they came together in a way that they couldn't come together before because they socialized through social media. Tunisia, Egypt -- in Egypt, the Tahrir Square gathering, began because people came together using a Facebook page.

They came together and when they came out on the streets they realized together, some people they couldn't realize in their living rooms and in the cafes around the country individually. They came together and they realized that together they didn't have to be afraid of their governments or regimes. And it is that lack of fear that people found on the streets together after planning separately and individually, is that lack of fear that's propelling them today in Syria, in Jordan, Bahrain, all these countries we're hearing about -- Piers.

MORGAN: Nic, thanks very much.

And you can follow Nic @NicRobertson@CNN on Twitter.

And I now want to bring in somebody else who's also an active user of Twitter. Susan Rice, United States ambassador to the U.N. She's @AmbassadorRice.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MORGAN: Ambassador Rice, thank you for joining me. The president said last night that the coalition military action in Libya stopped Gadhafi in his tracks. But today there is heavy shelling in Misrata. So what does stopped in the tracks mean?

SUSAN RICE, U.S. AMBASSADOR TO THE U.N.: What it means, Piers, is that as you well know when the coalition military activity began some 10 days ago, it occurred just as Gadhafi's forces were massing on the strategic city in the east of Benghazi where some 700,000 people were very vulnerable.

And the coalition activity which was designed to protect civilians and establishing a no-fly zone succeeded in preventing Gadhafi forces from marauding into Benghazi and we believe quite likely massacring thousands, as well as caused him to pull back from a Ajdabiya and Ras Lanuf and other important towns.

Now clearly the situation in Misrata is of grave concern and has been for some while. And the efforts that we and our NATO allies and Arab partners have been taking in and around Misrata to try to ease the threat to civilians continues.

MORGAN: Many American viewers watching this will remain, I think, a little confused that on the one hand you want regime change. On the other hand, you don't.

I mean which one is it? Because you can't have regime change and not have Gadhafi gone? So can you clarify it?

RICE: It's really -- it's really not that confusing. Let me explain it this way. We have a military mission which was requested by the Libyan people, requested by the Arab League, endorsed by the United Nations Security Council.

That military mission is very specific and very narrow. And that is to protect civilians at threat from Gadhafi's forces and to establish a no-fly zone.

We are not doing regime change through the barrel of a gun. We have done that in the past, we know how costly it is in terms of lives for Americans, almost by necessity requires putting large numbers of forces on the ground.

We know that it can cost extraordinary amounts of money as our intervention in Iraq did, some trillion dollars, and that is not a commitment we feel is necessary to replicate in the case of Libya.

Instead, we will squeeze Gadhafi by cutting off his arms through a global and heavily enforced arms embargo. We will cut off his finances, as we are doing, having seized $33 billion already in U.S.- controlled banks of his assets. We will cut of his flow of mercenaries. We will provide political and humanitarian and other assistance to the opposition --

MORGAN: Will you be arming -- will you be arming the rebels, Ambassador?

RICE: We will -- as I was just getting to, we'll be providing political, humanitarian, other forms of assistance to the opposition. We have not taken any decision to arm the opposition. We are still in the very early stages of working with them and getting to know them.

MORGAN: And finally, Ambassador, you are an active tweeter on Twitter. What's your -- what's your name on twitter?

RICE: @AmbassadorRice.

MORGAN: And what do you think of the power of Twitter in terms of what we've seen in the Middle East in particular where you have young, educated people using Twitter and other social networking means to spread the message from these countries in the way they perhaps wouldn't have been able to 10, 15 years ago?

RICE: Well, it certainly has dramatically changed the way that people can communicate with one another, rally one another, to common objectives. It's been very interesting to see how these social media tools like Twitter and Facebook have been used differently in different contexts.

In Egypt, in Tunisia, they were obviously very powerful organizing tools for those who were championing change and democracy.

In Libya, it seems that the opposition has coalesced without much reliance on those tools. So we're seeing different models and different experiences in different places.

MORGAN: Ambassador Rice, thank you very much.

RICE: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MORGAN: I now want to bring in the co-founders of Twitter, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, and "New York Times" columnist Nick Kristof.

Starting with you, guys. I mean, this has all come five years on now and the statistics are staggering. I mean it took three years for you to get the first tweet to the billionth tweet. It now takes users one week to send a billion tweets.

Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that you would have that kind of spread?

JACK DORSEY, @JACK, CO-FOUNDER, TWITTER: It's extremely humbling to see how quickly the velocity of the service, how it's taken off. And it gets faster and faster every single year, every single day that goes on. I think early on we knew how engaging it was and how magical it felt, but we had no idea what the users would do with it.

MORGAN: I mean you actually overdone the words there. We ought to be making you speak in 140 characters. Because the -- for those who don't --

Against protocol. Yes.

MORGAN: There are people watching this who've never been on Twitter, don't understand how it works. When I wasn't on it three months ago, I thought the whole thing was a total joke, I'll be honest. I thought it was a waste of time. Just idiotic celebrities gossiping to each other about the most mundane parts of their lives.

The moment I joined seemed to be one of those tipping points where everybody seemed to be coming on. And it's fascinating to me to see people like Nick Kristof and Nic Robertson, and others -- proper foreign correspondents using Twitter often as a primary news source. And I now do. I get all my news via Twitter.

Did you think that would happen? Obviously you knew it would be a medium for social networking. Did you realize how fundamental and important Twitter would become to news gathering and news reporting?

Yes, I don't -- I don't think so. I mean, like Jack said, it was immediately engaging to us. And that was the really important thing was that we were in love with this work. And that's what drove us.

BIZ STONE, @BIZ, CO-FOUNDER, TWITTER: Initially, many people just like you thought this was, you know, primarily a useless tool. But as people -- you know, it's chicken and the egg kind of thing. Because as millions of people joined, it became about following your interests and figuring out -- realizing that you could follow your friends, you could follow your family, you could follow what breaking news is happening around the world.

And it became, you know, that sort of thing. And that's what it is today. And that's how most people I think are accessing Twitter.

MORGAN: I mean what I like about it compared to something like Facebook, for example, is if you allow people to become a friend on Facebook, they can keep bothering you whenever they want. I mean you can't stop them. And they know when you're not replying.

STONE: Yes.

MORGAN: On Twitter, because of the sheer volume of people that comment and pass messages, you're under no compulsion to kind of respond to anybody. And that takes away a lot of the pressure of these enforced friend or followers.

DORSEY: Right.

MORGAN: Was that part of the thinking?

DORSEY: So it's always been focused on the recipient. And so you can write something and it goes out to the world, and people choose to follow it or not. And like Biz said, they follow their interests, they follow what they're passionate about and then they talk about it on the service with their friends.

So we have this information network constantly pushing out what's most meaningful and what's most important. And then a number of people discussing it over the service in real-time.

MORGAN: I want to remind people -- everyone watching, you know, they can keep tweeting now, they can tweet @PiersMorgan and get -- follow my account. (INAUDIBLE) leave you two that I have millions already.

The audience can all be tweeting. I've got my BlackBerry, I'm going to be tweeting.

More importantly, let's turn to you, Nick Kristof, senior writer on "The New York Times," top foreign correspondent.

I follow your tweets on Twitter. And I'm getting your information that I would have had to wait for perhaps on the newspaper the next day in real time, often as you are seeing it firsthand. How dramatically has this changed your working practice?

NICK KRISTOF, @NICKRISTOF, NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST: Well, it means that -- for example, in Egypt -- so when I go to Tahrir Square, as you know I did during the protests, and I see a thug sent by Mubarak, one of these plainclothes policemen carrying this big club with nails embedded in it, then you know I don't wait to see what happens, I don't wait for -- until my next column.

I just tweet, you know, Mubarak's thugs out here holding clubs with nails and better look out. And --

MORGAN: Which is amazingly powerful firsthand immediate testimony, isn't it?

KRISTOF: Absolutely. And then, you know, you can likewise take a picture of the person and then Twit-pic it. And so there's a photo of that person going out. And it enormously raises the cost of repression for regimes when you have -- it holds people accountable.

It holds dictators accountable. And one reasons we're not seeing more atrocities right now in the Middle East frankly is that everybody knows that, you know, there are people tweeting, there are people taking photos, and the word is getting out.

MORGAN: So it's all public now. So the old days when you could have a dictator suppressing his people quite happily, having got rid of all the journalists in a brutal way, it's all over because the people all have mobile phones, they all have, you know, laptops and so on.

Again, I come back to you guys, about the original premise for Twitter. What was it? When you sat down and -- I mean who came up with the name? Whose idea was it?

DORSEY: It was one of our co-workers, Noah Glass. And he found it in a dictionary. And it means a short, inconsequential burst of information or chirps from birds.

STONE: Yes.

MORGAN: This is very interesting, you see. So the original premise was based around a short, inconsequential chirping.

STONE: Right.

MORGAN: From birds which implies gossip, meaningless stuff. The kind of stuff I thought it was all about. When you hear what Nick Kristof just said, it's a completely different medium now. He's talking about exposing brutality by oppressive regimes in real time.

And it seems to me that although you may have got used to the idea at the time you invented Twitter, ever would have imagined that. Could you?

DORSEY: No. And that's the amazing thing about it. It's a true utility that scales to whatever the users want to do with it. I actually update about what I'm having for breakfast because, you know, 99.9999 percent of the world doesn't care, but my mom loves it.

(LAUGHTER)

DORSEY: And she also loves when I say that I'm in a new city, and she follows me around. So it's very useful for her. But then it can scale to a completely different context, a completely different part of the world, and completely different topic --

MORGAN: I had a great one on Saturday. When I was having a dispute with a camera store over being ripped off over a purchase of a camera.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Saw that.

MORGAN: So I decided to enlist some help on Twitter from Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson. And I tweeted them both, and they both responded immediately. Mike Tyson was in London, Lenox in Jamaica, offering their services should things turn ugly at the camera store. I had a full refund within one hour.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: That was the power of Twitter.

STONE: Wow. MORGAN: Nick, before you go, where do you think this will all end up for the media here? Because it seems to me -- and I used to run newspapers in Britain for -- you know, a long time.

And if I had seen an invention like Twitter, I would be excited by what it could bring to the medium but also slightly apprehensive. That newspapers in their current form were going pretty quickly become redundant, are they? Because everyone will get information in real time.

KRISTOF: Say it ain't so. No.

(LAUGHTER)

KRISTOF: I don't think it is. I mean, I think that though my job as columnist will be profoundly changed, right now essentially my formal day job is producing two columns a week. I think that probably 15 years from now, 20 years from now, essentially my job will be to turn out opinions, and I'll do that through some combination of tweets, Facebook posts, and blogs, short commentaries that I'm updating all the time.

YouTube videos. I think it will be an entirely different version with different platforms, different media. But essential job of pontificating, if you will, will be, you know, pretty recognizably similar.

MORGAN: Final question. Who do you tell first when you have a juicy bit of information? The bosses or Twitter?

KRISTOF: Well, actually that has come up a few times when I'm in some very dicey position, and I tweet. And then my wife later says, you know, I don't want to find out about these things on Twitter.

(LAUGHTER)

KRISTOF: I was once in a plane crash. And -- in Congo. And fortunately that was before Twitter. But you know I'd hate to think that next time I'm --

MORGAN: I'm crashing now.

KRISTOF: Yes, my plane is crashing. I'd want to I think call my wife before I tweeted that.

MORGAN: Nick Kristof, thank you very much.

If you gentlemen stay with me, we're going to bring in somebody who's really harnessed the power of Twitter. Martha Stewart.

(APPLAUSE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(APPLAUSE)

MORGAN: That was a tweet from the Bronx Zoo Cobra asking, what does a snake have to do to get this account verified?

Five years ago Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone were just a couple of guys with a dream. A dream that turned into Twitter. Take a look at how it all began at a park in San Francisco.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

STONE: So here we are at South Park where the original Twitter offices were. It's 164 South Park.

DORSEY: Early 2006, went out to this playground.

STONE: Right here. Yes.

DORSEY: Sat right up there where we discussed the very, very simple idea of via SMS, sending a message and then receiving messages from your friends. It's very humbling, but it doesn't feel like it has been that long.

STONE: Stone.

DORSEY: It feels like we're here yesterday having the same conversation.

STONE: That's the thing I was going to say. I don't know if I should be joyful or slightly depressed that five years has gone by sort of like in the blink of an eye. People who didn't really take to it -- the first nine months or so. It was mostly just us.

DORSEY: We started thinking about all the terms. People just started using the word tweet to refer to an individual status update on Twitter. Felt really tangible. Felt like something you'd do in your natural life. And the whole service was about --

STONE: Mobile --

DORSEY: Getting out.

STONE: Yes.

KRISTOF: Being in the world. Sharing this idea of being agnostic, was a word that we used in the beginning with regard to the device that you choose to use for Twitter.

STONE: And that's why it's 140 characters or less. So it works on mobile phones.

DORSEY: The beautiful thing about the 140 characters is that it's a small canvas size that you don't feel like you need to compose yourself or you need to like really spend a lot of time on. You can just make a mark and you can send whatever you're thinking. You can be in the moment and really just get it out there. And that's allowed the velocity to go very, very fast.

(END OF VIDEO CLIP)

(APPLAUSE)

MORGAN: I want to bring in somebody now who tweets nearly as much as I do. Not quite. And that's Martha Stewart.

Martha, welcome.

STEWART: Hi.

MORGAN: You are a very active tweeter, and you're very smart with it. Because I've noticed it's a mixture of amusing stuff about you and your life, but primarily it's a fantastic business tool, isn't it?

STEWART: It is very much so. And I use it for surveys. I use it to show partners, business partners how effective an instant survey about a product, for example. If Macy's wants to know if somebody is going to like a sheet, I can ask a vast audience if they're going to like a pink sheet.

MORGAN: How vast is your audience at the moment?

STEWART: Well, it's -- right now I have about 2.2 million followers. And I hope after this show, a few more will follow me.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: Well, funny enough, Charlie Sheen was here three weeks ago? And when I interviewed him, at one of the commercial breaks, I said, are you on Twitter, and he said, I'm thinking about it. I said, you should get on it. The next day he went on.

STEWART: Yes.

MORGAN: He had over three million followers.

STEWART: I know. I know.

MORGAN: In three weeks.

STEWART: In 24 hours then you get a million followers --

MORGAN: Yes, it's really extraordinary.

STEWART: And --

MORGAN: And in terms of followers, how important is it to get huge volume? I mean Kim Kardashian is 200,000 away from overtaking President Obama, for example. Does it show power and influence, the total?

STONE: I don't think she's going to actually take over the presidency if she gets more followers than Obama.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: That's a key thing to remember. And -- I interrupted you.

DORSEY: No. The amazing thing is it depends on the content. The -- there's a man in a boat on the Hudson River. He had 20 followers. A plane landed in the Hudson, he took a picture of it. And suddenly it was an international conversation within a minute.

So it's not so dependent on the followers. The followers certainly help direct attention, but it really depends on the content and what you're sharing with the world.

MORGAN: It also seems to me, Martha, that a lot of the benefit of Twitter to a celebrity is the ability to control image, to control the message, to respond to, you know, outrageous allegations in the media. Whatever you choose to do. You become almost a -- in perpetuity publicist, don't you?

STEWART: Well, you could. I don't -- I don't try to do that at all. I really kind of run through the responses for my followers, but I don't really answer them regularly. Tonight I just answered one because they were making fun of me. But -- and I wanted them to watch the show.

But generally, what I do is I put out what I want to say, what I would like people to know, and then I let them interpret it. I think that's a very good use of Twitter.

MORGAN: What is a bad use of Twitter, particularly for famous people?

STEWART: Well, I don't know what a bad use it, because I have had only very, very good response to my tweets. And I don't spend more than five minutes a day tweeting. I find that that is really a sufficient amount of time to get across the messaging that I would like.

MORGAN: See, I have five minutes -- I have five minutes a day when I don't tweet. It's the -- it's the other way around. So --

(LAUGHTER)

STEWART: Oh.

MORGAN: Yes, I don't bring it on set and all. Just stick it here.

STEWART: While you're still -- are you still new to it?

MORGAN: I'm a newbie, yes.

STEWART: Yes. So after a while, you're going to get used to it, and you're going to figure out who what it's good for. And it is good for a lot of good things.

MORGAN: See, I like having -- I like having fun on it. I like picking dodgy feuds with celebrities, you know, ranting about airlines if I'm being held up. I mean, I think it's quite funny to do all that.

STEWART: Right.

MORGAN: It's part of the chirping you were talking about. I'm not sure I'm really the sort of perfect model for this.

STEWART: Well, if you like to rant and stuff, you can do that. But I don't know if it's a good idea. You're in the public eye now, Piers.

MORGAN: That's what worries me.

STEWART: Every day.

MORGAN: I've got a question for you, Martha. We asked people questions, to come in by Twitter. Because you're of Polish descent, what is your favorite Polish dish that you like to cook?

STEWART: Pierogi.

MORGAN: Pierogi?

STEWART: Yes.

MORGAN: And what is Pierogi?

STEWART: It's a dumpling.

MORGAN: A dumpling.

STEWART: It's a dough-covered filling and my favorite is sweet cabbage.

MORGAN: Well, you made me a very nice cake today for my birthday.

STEWART: Yes, happy birthday.

MORGAN: Well, thank you very much.

STEWART: That's tomorrow, right?

MORGAN: It's tomorrow. It's today in England at the moment.

STEWART: OK.

MORGAN: So I get two birthdays now. It's quite nice, this trans-Atlantic life.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: What would you say, Martha, to people who are thinking about coming on Twitter but aren't too sure? What's the persuasive element for you?

STEWART: Well, I just got a whole lot of tweets from people saying -- I'm sure they're dictating the requests of their child or something, asking how difficult is it, it is very easy. Once you master just typing on your BlackBerry or on your iPad or on your iPhone, you can do it very, very easily.

MORGAN: Number one rule for me, it seems for celebrities, maybe you chaps did respond to this, is don't drink alcohol and then hit Twitter.

(LAUGHTER)

MORGAN: Maybe have a midnight rule, no booze.

STEWART: I misspelled one night after I had gone out to a dinner. And they all -- they accused me of being drunk. I got -- I heard from one of my partners -- that I shouldn't go out and get, you know, drunk.

All I did was try to tweet in the dark. On a BlackBerry in the car. And so I hit a couple wrong letters.

MORGAN: Fatal mistakes, Martha.

STEWART: Oh, boy. I'm telling you.

STONE: She wasn't driving.

MORGAN: Should you drink and tweet?

STONE: Absolutely not.

MORGAN: It's lethal, isn't it?

(CROSSTALK)

MORGAN: It's lethal.

STEWART: If you're famous.

MORGAN: Yes. For anybody really.

(CROSSTALK)

STEWART: If you have a reputation to uphold.

MORGAN: You're famous in a relationship, it's a killer. Do not drink and -- what is it, drink and tweet?

When we come back, we're going to have Alissa Milano joining us from Los Angeles. She used Twitter to announce some very important personal news.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Alyssa Milano Tweets, are you flirting with me? Me? No. And I'm definitely not bringing you these fragrantly fragrant flowers and a handwritten note form heart to your doorstep via my bare feet running over the California mountains either, forever.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: That was, of course, the famous Old Spice Guy in a video response to a Tweet from the woman who's joining us now, Alyssa Milano. Alyssa, this was a rather curious way to track your follower account up, wasn't it?

ALYSSA MILANO, ACTRESS: That was a very proud Twitter moment for me, yes.

MORGAN: Tell us what happened there, for those who don't know.

MILANO: Well, I found out that the Old Spice Guy was on Twitter. And I sent him a Tweet. And he responded with a video message. And I thought, wow, OK, how can I actually use this to, you know, creates some sort of money for a charity. So I actually made a video in return asking him to donate some money to a charity, which Old Spice did, in turn, do for me.

And I think if we're talking about the power of Twitter for a celebrity, I've found that being able to raise money for causes that are important to me and just empower people about certain issues -- it is such a brilliant arena for that.

A couple of years ago for my birthday, I was able to raise 98,000 dollars for Charity Water and build 18 clean water wells in Ethiopia. After the earthquake in Haiti, I sent out a Tweet challenge to major corporations, and I donated 50,000 dollars to UNICEF, and challenged these corporations to match my donation. And we were able to raise 450,000 dollars for the victims of the Haiti earthquake. So --

MORGAN: That's fascinating. Have you found the same thing, Martha? Forget business for a moment, in terms of raising awareness of issues, charitable causes?

STEWART: Definitely, definitely. I gave a party for the Japanese relief just last week. And my Tweets, I think, brought a whole lot of people to this event, which raised a lot of money. It's the same kind of thing. I think it's a very good way to reach a vast number of people very quickly, instantaneously.

MORGAN: I want to talk back to Alyssa. I want you to find an amusing Tweet that's coming to you while we're on air. Alyssa, let me come back you. I'm curious about another aspect of this, which is how far celebrities should go in revealing information about themselves?

I ask you because you actually recently announced the sex of your unborn baby on Twitter. Which was a new first, I think.

MILANO: Yes.

MORGAN: Did you have any -- any qualms about doing that? MILANO: No. Here's what happened -- there's actually a legitimate story behind that. I had found out the gender of the baby a week before. And I walked a red carpet about two days after I found out the gender. And I did an interview, and I slipped, and I called the baby a "he." And I went home and I thought, oh, this is going to be everywhere, did Alyssa Milano slip, is she having a boy.

So I thought, you know, before this became some sort of, you know, hoopla that I would nip it in the bud and just announce the gender of the baby with a link to my official website, you know, and a blog post that I did. And that is another great sort of tool to have, you know, in an arsenal, which is you can actually control the information that gets out there.

And I think that that's really important. But I don't want to dismiss -- I don't want to dismiss the fact that I believe that Twitter is the closest thing that we have to time travel. It's the closest thing that we truly have a global community. There are no boundaries. We are all the same on Twitter. And we're --

MORGAN: We're all Twits, really, aren't we?

MILANO: We're all Twits.

MORGAN: Let me ask Jack and Biz quickly. About the -- I would call it the demystifying of the celebrity culture here -- because when you have celebrities revealing their every moment in real time, you know, their health problems, their this, their that, the other, there is a kind of change, isn't there, from the old style star system, where there was -- say, with Elizabeth Taylor who died without people knowing very much about her. That was part of her magical appeal.

Do you worry slightly that you're part of this crushing of all the mystique about famous people? About stars?

STONE: Actually, early on I didn't think celebrities would want to use Twitter because I thought for exactly that reason, that part of their allure was that you couldn't get close to them. You couldn't find out what was going on in their world. That was part of the reason why they were celebrities.

But, you know, I think celebrities and politicians both realize the same sort of thing. That is that they can have this kind of connection with their constituents and their fans they wouldn't otherwise be able to have anywhere else.

Martha does the same thing. And just by creating this real live connection, be able to gather that real-time feedback about your products and about your business. Or if you're a politician, to be able to communicate with your constituents. That became a powerful thing. That turned around my opinion.

MORGAN: I want to see -- Martha, you got any good Tweets?

STEWART: Here's a good one. "Sweet cabbage is called capusta. My grandmother made it best homemade in a wooden barrel in her cellar."

MORGAN: You see, I wouldn't have known that. I feel instantly better informed.

STEWART: Exactly.

MORGAN: Martha Stewart, thank you very much. Alyssa Milano, thank you very much. Jack and Biz are going to stay here throughout the rest of the show. Keep Tweeting,@PiersMorgan or @PiersTonight. We want to hear all your Tweets for any of our guests tonight.

And we're going to bring in somebody who physically used Twitter to move his city forward in a snowdrift, Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYOR CORY BOOKER (D), NEWARK, NEW JERSEY: Twitter has become one of our great tools in local government services. In an emergency now, not only am I getting information from my command center team about what's happening with the snowstorm, but I'm getting firsthand information from people.

I'm now able to crowd source thousands of people to drive information that I need to run a better government.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MORGAN: A great example of how my next guest is using Twitter to run a city. Joining us is Newark's Mayor Cory Booker.

Quite right, too. Popular man in these parts. And I know why, because I was actually here in the area when that huge snowdrift struck. And in contrast to poor old Mayor Bloomberg, who was getting booted all around New York by the media because he had the gall to spend 48 hours without solving it, which in Britain would have taken three years -- you were getting all the praise because you hit the Twitter and you were just talking directly to people trapped in the snow, weren't you?

BOOKER: Well, every mayor was struggling in this area. I don't want to beat up on Bloomberg because his team was fighting this worst snowstorm we'd seen in years.

MORGAN: Eighteen inch drifts, shocking.

BOOKER: Unbelievable. But for us, we were able to use all our traditional tools to fight the snowstorm. But for me being out there in a sort of mobile command center, I was able to interact with a people in a way that we never had before. As a result of that, we were able to get help to people that critically needed it, whether it was emergency services, stranded folks who were in cars. It was just an amazing experience.

MORGAN: It was very well targeted. You were literally saying give me the street you are on right now; we will get somebody to you. When did you realize this was going to be a really effective tool for you?

BOOKER: I got on in March -- May of '09. And immediately when I started seeing that I could sort of -- it was a democratizing force. I wasn't a victim of media outlets who would only give you a minute of time. We actually could now talk directly to our residents, thousands of them.

And Newarkers now -- you know, we have tens of thousands of followers in my city. They can take pictures of problems. We can respond to them. Feed me information often before my staff gets me that information. And it's a wonderful, wonderful way for our city to actually function. It's a tool in our toolbox, as I said earlier, that is very valuable.

MORGAN: Mayors have been called Twits for years. You're now the proud owner of being the chief mayoral Twit in America.

BOOKER: People are not defined in isolation. They're defined in their relationships to each other. And governments, which are such centers of human activity, need to use these new tools, new platforms to better serve folks.

For us in Newark, it's really helped us, number one, lift the veil from government, which often people are seen as just twits and don't realize that we are just like everybody else, struggling with issues, getting upset about things.

Today, I saw somebody littering in my street, leapt out of my car, grabbed the litter, threw it back in their car window.

MORGAN: Did you really?

BOOKER: I did. But then I Tweeted that. I love the pride in my city. So many people starting Tweeting me back. It created a thunder in my account.

MORGAN: There are now thousands of people all over the city chucking garbage back in cars. Is that what you want to see happen?

BOOKER: I hope so. I want to see -- for me, as a mayor, it's a great way to be motivated by my residents, but also to motivate back and to challenges people.

We have an anti-obesity campaign called Let's Move, along with the First Lady, that we've got people exercising. We talk about issues of public safety, talk about issues of mentoring.

You know, every day, we try to send out positive messages to inspire people as well as re-Tweet, frankly, the positive message that we get in from our residents. It's created a great community of Newarkers and, frankly, people -- I have over a million followers. There's only 290,000 people in my city. So it's created a big community following even beyond Newark. MORGAN: Let me turn to Jack and Biz quickly on that. Did you imagine -- you didn't, because you already said the Twitter original idea was inconsequential chit chat. Now you have mayors of major cities in America using you to democratize the people. Pretty extraordinary, isn't it?

DORSEY: It's amazing what people are doing with it. And they redefine the service every single Tweet. And Mayor Cory has just been so, so impressive in how he reaches out to the city in real time. He gets real time reports on what people are feeling about the city and what needs to be fixed and what's going very well, and can instantly react. And he does. That's the most inspiring thing.

MORGAN: Would you like to see the president being more pro- active on Twitter himself, actually doing what you do?

BOOKER: I don't know if it's practical there. But for me it's a great thing for -- we create authenticity from our friends and from our leadership. For me, it's just a great way to be myself. Ultimately, you know, helping me find potholes or water main breaks are great. But, more importantly, we all know cities have a rhythm. They have a spirit.

And what Twitter's helping us do, and other social media platforms, are really helping us to galvanize that spirit of a city. And Newark is a city that's charging back. And so the people --

MORGAN: Mainly thanks to you being on the charge on Twitter. I have a question for you that's coming on Twitter. What do you think about the role of Twitter in creating talented leaders in U.S. politics?

BOOKER: Well, you know, I think that leaders need to be accessible. This is a great way for people to be accessible. And often -- I saw this -- when you are dealing with the urgencies, you're drinking out of a fire hose. You tend to live in a bubble.

The more you can get out with the people, the better. So we still have community meetings. We still have -- I still go door to door.

But this is a way for me to get out of my bubble with thousands of people that can talk to me. Literally, I get in conversations at 2:00 in the morning about critical issues. So I think it's going to be not the exception to have mayors and other leaders. It's going to become the norm.

Frankly, as we see, city departments are now on Twitter because it's a great way to get information from residents in a real-time way.

MORGAN: It might also take over voting. The winner of the next election will be the guy with the most followers by Christmas. Why not? We've still got Alyssa Milano. Finally to wrap this up, I wanted to ask you how far do you go with what you put on Twitter? When you have your baby, will you be putting the first baby pictures proudly up on your Twitter, Tweeting to the world? MILANO: I don't know about baby pictures, because then that becomes a security issue. But I often joke with my husband that he's going to get to the hospital. And I will have already given birth and say to him, "didn't you see my Tweet? It's over. You missed the whole thing."

I don't know. I think that's a personal choice. It depends on how much you want to share. And only -- I've always been very accessible to my fans. It's part of -- one of my favorite things about my career is I grew up in everyone's living room.

So for me to share intimate details about my life is not so crazy. But, you know, it's not for everyone. And I do understand that. It also gives you, you know, control over -- we live in such a time of pop culture and the Internet where your privacy is sort of invaded anyway. So if you can control that and you can give the information you want to give, then that's a beautiful thing.

MORGAN: So basically what you're saying is celebrities should just invade their own privacy. It makes life a lot easier all around.

MILANO: If you can't beat them, join them.

MORGAN: Alyssa Milano --

BOOKER: It's better to be sort of not on the menu but at the table. And this is a way for everybody to be at the table and have a lot more control.

MORGAN: Thank you very much. We'll be back with more guests in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWS BREAK)

MORGAN: Joining us now two people who know a lot about both sides of Twitter, Gary Vaynerchuk, entrepreneur and author of "The Thank You," and Katie Rosman, who is a staff reporter for the "Wall Street Journal," and author of the book "If You Knew Suzie."

Katie, you wrote a spectacularly readable article about Twitter in this weekend's "Wall Street Journal" which you said your mind and soul is in cyberspace and all we're left with is the husk.

KATHERINE ROSMAN, "THE WALL STREET JOURNAL": Even better, my husband said that. The story really looked at the role that Twitter can play in relationships, for better or for worse. My husband is not on Twitter. And I am. And I'm super into it, both as a reporter and just as a consumer of news and media.

MORGAN: But you wrote about it as if you were a kind of junkie. This had taken a grip of your life. And I know this feeling. My wife says if she sees me doing one more Tweet, it's all over. So I immediately tweeted that.

ROSMAN: As well you should.

MORGAN: That's the definition of obsessive junkie, isn't it?

ROSMAN: It is. It absolutely has an obsessive quality to it. I think that it's playing itself out in families all over the place. My five-year-old son will say something cute and say, don't Tweet that, mommy. It's horrifying.

But it is a bit obsessive, and it's hard to, you know, create the boundaries, because it's such a fluid thing. And what's great about Twitter is how it breaks down boundaries. So to try to box it in and fit it into your life in different ways is complicated.

MORGAN: I'm going to bring you in. You're another obsessive Tweeter. I've spoken to you before about this. You had a great guideline to how to drive followers, how to drive business opportunity. You see it as a really great business tool, don't you?

GARY VAYNERCHUK, ENTRPRENEUR: Yeah, I do. And I also think that this whole show -- and I've been watching -- has been a lot about talking. You know, I think that Twitter is the greatest listening tool we've ever seen. I got to be honest you, I was in a green room and I was listening to Martha. I love Martha as much as anybody, but I kind of threw up on myself when I heard her say, I just say stuff and then people interpret it.

This is the listening platform of our generation. Search.Twitter.com, to me, is easily the single most important thing that anybody in this audience there needs to be using on a daily basis. People are talking about you, your businesses, the genre you're in.

MORGAN: But when I put my name in to Search.Twitter.com, whatever it is, all I see is streams of abuse. Who wants to see that all way?

VAYNERCHUK: We've talked about this before. You know. Listen, I love that you want to Lord Sugar and all that. But I'd much rather you --

MORGAN: He's going to be so happy he said his name. Seriously, he's in Florida right now dying of excitement.

VAYNERCHUK: Looking at that screen, there are people in Kansas, Arkansas, L.A., New York, that I think are watching this show, seeing the guys who created this amazing platform, listening to all these amazing people. And they want to touch you and they want to get involved with you.

I think that people -- I'll be honest with you, when people talk about Twitter, they always say, what am I going to say? I always say, it has nothing to do with that. Are you willing to listen?

When I started WineTV (ph), nobody knew who I was. I went in and searched chardonnay, merlot, pinot grigio, and I responded. I think this is one of the most powerful business tools. MORGAN: OK, let me bring in these two. You actually invented Twitter. He's behaving like he did. He's telling us all exactly how it should be used. Is he right? Or is actually, Twitter, in the end, as I see it -- I love his enthusiasm, but I think it's a personal thing. I think Twitter is whatever you want it to be.

STONE: Earlier, you asked what is a good way to recommend getting started to people for Twitter. I always recommend using search first to sort of get your toes wet and see what people are saying about your field or things that you're interested in, following your interests, that sort of thing.

Inevitably what happens is you start following your favorite basketball player or something like this. Then, one day, you will have something you want to say back. You'll have an opinion and then you'll look for how to Tweet. So I think that's a natural way in.

Of course, we couldn't start that way, because there was nothing to pay attention to at first. We had to encourage people to say something.

MORGAN: A sort of central plank of your piece was this could potentially be relationship damaging. We've had stories -- I can remember a big one in Britain recently where a major television personality got a little bit too friendly with his follows and got exposed by the papers. That was the end of his career, basically. Are you worried do you think for relationships and Twitter? Can you get a little bit too fresh on Twitter?

ROSMAN: Well, it's a public medium. So if you're out there saying indiscrete things, either being in a relationship or a profession where that's not called for, that's probably not the smartest application of the technology. It's not really brain surgery. It's public.

But I think the real risk to relationships is that you're connecting with people online and in this very private, reclusive way that excludes everybody else in the room. And as I talked about in the piece, when I was growing up, my mom would be on the phone all the time and it would be annoying, and I would try to get her attention and I couldn't.

But I heard what she was talking about. I was part of those conversations. As I said, the noise coming from the kitchen was part of the fabric of the family. And that is missing from Twitter and something that I think leads to isolation in relationships.

MORGAN: We have been warned. I don't think it's going to stop any of us.

ROSMAN: Not me.

MORGAN: Katie, Gary, thank you both very much for joining me. We're going to come back in a moment and ask these two geniuses what the next big idea is. That's what I really want to know.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MORGAN: Back with Twitter founders Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. All I want to know before we close this Twitter show is what is the next big thing? That's it. What is it?

DORSEY: Square. It's the easiest way to accept credit card payments. You can accept credit card payments from your phone. You just go to the ap store, download square.

MORGAN: I want to buy your iPad. What do I do?

DORSEY: I can swipe your card right here. It goes through. And then you just sign with your finger.

MORGAN: That's it. I sign, processed, done, and anyone can do it, anybody else.

DORSEY: Anyone can do it.

MORGAN: You're going to make another billion, are you? You sicken me, the pair of you! Guys, thank you so much.

(APPLAUSE)

MORGAN: (inaudible) my colleague Anderson Cooper with "AC 360."