I understand your underlying thesis, however. I don’t that I totally agree or disagree. If you use the analogy of e-mail, a robust ecosystem has erupted, even including a hardy e-discovery ecosystem (lawyers have to find their way into everything).

Past this, the standard of e-mail is completely open, but it is a true mess as the scale to which it has grown was not originally considered (nor the vectors of abuse). Twitter is a very close parallel to this, so good call again.

However, no one owned the SMTP protocol. So what you are proposing is that Twitter originate and hand over it’s TWTR protocol, right?

Offerings such as Exchange, Notes, and Groupwise are great examples of ecosystems that developed for businesses and are robust platforms, no doubt. However, they are all extremely proprietary as well (and cost lots of money). Offerings like Yahoo!, GMail, and Windows Live are other iterations of free mail, sure – but I would not count them as infrastructure in the broader scope of things that most people are used to (outside of Google’s recent SaaS e-mail offerings to universities and what not).

All that said, I get where you are going, but I’m not entirely convinced it is a good move either way. Quite frankly, Twitter was a poor iteration of presence awareness, IMHO. Sure it is revolutionizing the medium – but it’s because it addressed an untapped need/want, not because the platform is ground breaking. For that, the creators get a lot of latitude (and deservedly so).

Really good thoughts… think more on this and then go get hired by Twitter to consult on how they should run their business

However, if Twitter wants to become an infrastructure provider, it needs to communicate with its developers better, and give them advance warning of API and other changes that will affect them. I’ve been following Jesse Stay’s posts regarding this issue for over a year now, and it doesn’t appear that things have improved.

If not fixed this will be the thin edge of the wedge imho …

As soon as a provider decides what’s best they aren’t thinking of you, what tends to happen is it’s all dumbed down for the unwashed masses.

The fundamental point of “cool things” and places (irl too) is that they are populated by nice, interesting people which is what makes it cool. Masses just see anything thats popular as ‘cool’ which is why @biz decision is fubar.

If we planned cities on how the masses behave we wouldn’t even have sewers.

And you ignore your users and they go away.

I was not clear in the post regarding the new “reply rules”. I disagree with what they did and think they should just focus on infrastructure. They should not worry about the user interface functionality because that is not the real power of the service.

unless you’re one of those people that go to a party and never talk to anyone new you’re really not going to think this is a good idea.

the only benefits are for simple minded fools who can’t cope with more than touching themselves while they look at celeb pics … how’s it have anything to do with infrasructure?

Taking the @reply away just means that your going to rely on #followfriday or sit using search (which sucks).

Twitters attempt at suggestion tools was terrible … yeah i want to follow a moms group? Al Gore? why … im not a mainstream moron.

Any valid reason why it shouldn’t be more than an option for antisocial nobodies?