i wonder, too, if their whole control-freak attitude has alienated the people who were most invested in discussing and helping with this sort of meta-issue just out of a "twitter is the new commons" feeling.

i have no real idea whether it is or isn't essential to their business model to be able to control every aspect of how you view your stream, but personally i stopped caring about them the minute they did that. i still use twitter, but if they vanished overnight i wouldn't really feel any sense of loss, whereas when there was a thriving ecosystem of people building things atop the firehose i did feel like i was part of something that played a significant role in today's internet.