No, there's probably not a patent encumbrance. IANAL.

But there's so much more that makes it more than just a technical problem. Ask your random 40-year-old working in a non-tech industry if they've heard of Twitter. Now ask them if they've heard of StatusNet or identi.ca.

In a nutshell, that is what makes it more than just a technical problem.

Since it's sometimes considered nice to explain a downvote, I wanted to mention I downvoted you for spending time telling us how qualified you were instead of just restating your question in a simpler way.

I don't know why your other post was downvoted, but probably because people think it's not an interesting question, could be determined by actually going to Google yourself and doing your own homework/search and most people don't feel like patents, if they exist, are the problem with twitter's dominance.

Actually -- by saying "very qualified remarks" forkandwait was not talking about his/her education. S/He was instead referring to the fact that by calling the problem of getting market share "(VERY non-trivial)" in the OP - they were well aware of the issue and asking a simple question about twitter's patent protection (or lack thereof).

Well, you don't seem to understand what "qualified" means in the context written -- when I said that my response was qualified it meant that I put caveats around it ("I qualified my response"). Sorry if I was unclear.

Ah ha. I understand how it could have been used in that context, just failed to understand that it was. Thanks for clarifying.

Literacy fail.

FWIW: Being wrong abut an ambiguous grammar is not a failure of literacy.

Also, your comments contribute what to this discussion?