<story><title>Burned by Twitter, Developers Launch Distributed Microblogging Service</title><url>http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/03/burned-by-twitters-api.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmathai</author><text>Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter&apos;s recent actions are the nerds. At this point Twitter has too much momentum for the nerds to have much (if any) influence. Building &quot;open&quot; technology isn&apos;t an effective method of social engineering here. I wish I knew a better alternative but I don&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I never understood why everyone (including pg) referred to Twitter as this great new protocol. It&apos;s 100% proprietary and this type of decision should have been easily predicted. SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs.&lt;p&gt;But good for the developers. The seem passionate about the idea and are building it. Kudos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kirubakaran</author><text>What about Twitter&apos;s actions that are yet to come?&lt;p&gt;And why not just try? What if the open platform succeeds? Even if the chance of success is 0.01%, it is worth trying. Also, a million such attempts by million such teams can fail. Only one team needs to succeed. Once.</text></comment>
<story><title>Burned by Twitter, Developers Launch Distributed Microblogging Service</title><url>http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2011/03/burned-by-twitters-api.php</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jmathai</author><text>Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter&apos;s recent actions are the nerds. At this point Twitter has too much momentum for the nerds to have much (if any) influence. Building &quot;open&quot; technology isn&apos;t an effective method of social engineering here. I wish I knew a better alternative but I don&apos;t.&lt;p&gt;That being said, I never understood why everyone (including pg) referred to Twitter as this great new protocol. It&apos;s 100% proprietary and this type of decision should have been easily predicted. SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs.&lt;p&gt;But good for the developers. The seem passionate about the idea and are building it. Kudos.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ddagradi</author><text>Twitter also started out as a niche product &quot;for the nerds&quot;: early adopters drive mass adoption. The fact that Twitter is a firmly entrenched player doesn&apos;t stop us from competing with a better, simpler product.&lt;p&gt;I completely agree that &quot;open&quot; is not the great differentiator that will attract endless droves of users. While it makes the platform more attractive to developers and those who share this mindset, the average user&apos;s priority is neither owning their data nor using &quot;open&quot; technologies. What we do have, however, is the opportunity and enthusiasm to build something new and exciting with a community of greatly talented individuals.</text></comment>