So that great branding? A lucky accident

The Q&A with Evan Williams, the co-founder and CEO of Twitter - and formerly of Blogger, which I'm using right now, for that matter - kind of disappointed me, which is really unfair on my part.
That's because I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how Twitter and microblogging and other social networking tools have changed the world. How anyone can now spread the news of anything - John Q. Public but also newsman, marketers and maniacs. How dictators can no longer lock the foreign journalists up in their hotel to crack down on people protesting for democracy - as in Iran in recent months. How it was citizens who reported the dreadful violence in Mumbai - but also how users were misled by a kid in New Jersey that day, and how it could have been misused by the terrorists.
I was disappointed because Williams seemed like a clever businessman who helped create something - microblogging - without really realizing what he had made, how much potential it had, how it could change the world.
I'm sure he lays awake at night wondering how the service is ever going to turn a profit commensurate with its success, but I didn't get the impression he spends much time thinking about the deeper societal issues. Gutenberg talking about how nice the new printed bibles look.
Basically, the account he gave made it seem like the success of unintended consequences.
"We didn't start Twitter expecting it to be something really big. We stumbled into it and realized (later) it was a really big deal."
Even the name. He said the developers were talking about how getting a "status update," as they were initially called, from a cell phone in a pocket would make a user "twitch." Someone looked up twitch in the dictionary and "twitter"was the word just below it, meaning the sounds birds make. That led to the name, and the bird logo. And, he said, he has no idea what early user came up with Tweet.
He did say - other posters have already noted because I'm just now getting around to this - that Twitter is working on a feature that would list, or distinguish, reliable tweeters from the masses. And, he noted, speaking to us mainstream media types, "You shouldn't look on us as an example because no matter what we make less money than you do."
Another lesson for us. He noted starting Twitter was like planting seeds to see what grows. "Users taught us what Twitter should be." The lesson for us? "It's not up to you at that point."