Well, except that Twitter is a private company and its API is proprietary in that sense, unlike http or email. (Maybe a better analogy would be people building MS Outlook plugins, way back when.)

I'm just not convinced that it's more than a fad within the development community, and I'm even less convinced that if it is indeed something more than a fad, it will remain confined to a single company's API.

But I've been wrong plenty of times before and I doubt anyone will notice if I'm wrong again. :)

But, people _could_ adopt http://identi.ca, and help make laconi.ca a better distributed platform and then transition to it. This isn't bound to happen though, but it _could_.

To the extent that any "more open than twitter!" competitor begins to gain adoption, twitter can simply open up a little bit to kill it.

Knowing this, why would anyone put a big financial and infrastructure commitment into a more-open twitter clone?

But, if Twitter opens up a bit we all win! Ultimately, laconi.ca is attempting to be a distributed, open Twitter. Any more openness in Twitter will help make that happen, because laconi.ca can take advantage of new API methods to build abstractions for it's own distributed service protocol.

laconi.ca is OSS and can't be killed. All it needs is volunteers and users, and a turn to the dark side by Twitter would supply them. As such it makes a nice "sword of Damocles".

It is a bite more than a fad. I met someone and told them I was doing a startup and she did not know what a startup was. After I explain her that I wanted to create a tech company she seemed to understand a bit more but still proceeded to yarn. Fast forward three weeks later she asks me if I knew about Twitter "this website that.....". "This Website" showed me that Twitter was now mainstream.

Way back when? So Xobni is an example of "what is old is new again." (I had no idea there used to be a ton of Outlook plugins...)

Some are still around, See for example http://www.caelo.com/

I agree that it's a new protocol. I also think that because it's a new space and people are always dissatisfied with how they interact with it, coupled with the rather easy development, is pushing the myriad of apps.

I'm developing one, but even though the space is growing more and more crowded I'm not concerned. It's not being done as a primary source of income, but as a side project to help build my development skills as it provides unique problems which I don't face in my day to day web development.

The api to the service provider may be seen as an application protocol, but Twitter is a platform.