Twitter: The beginning of the end?

Uh, sending a C&#38;D to a shady application that uses their trademark in its name doesn't really spell "alienating their developer community." They are one of the most engaging API providers I've ever seen; they actually talk to people via their Twitter account, engage developers via the mailing list, etc.<p>And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow?<p>Ridiculous linkbait.

<i>In my opinion, all it takes now, is the creation of a small number of killer-apps on clones platform to cement the fate of Twitter.</i><p>People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time.<p>Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer from competition you must at least <i>name</i> the competition. I see that you kept your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the list makes the joke even funnier. (<i>Skittr</i>? <i>Yonkly</i>? <i>Kwippy</i>? Were these auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand Hill Road are trembling with fear.)<p>(Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the urge to have delusions of grandeur.)<p>Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model <i>and</i> be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)

This headline is over-inflamatory, and the article is pretty far off the mark.<p>Twitter is very good to developers. The only cases where there are altercations are when people use the word "Twitter" in their service's name. That's defending their trademark - something all companies need to do if they want to keep those trademarks.<p>Twitter's not headed for big trouble at all - or at least, that trouble will have nothing to do with the problems mentioned in the article. The main trouble on Twitter's road, imho, is the big battle they're having with Facebook. There'll probably only be one winner in that one.

"Twitter has exactly two things going for it:<p><pre><code> * the number of registered users on Twitter and the network between those users," </code></pre> That's not exactly accurate. There's a <i>reason</i> Twitter has users. You don't attract all those users in the first place without some kind of feature people want.

My significant other, who wrote The Twitter Book and so gets asked these sorts of questions a lot, has a pretty effective answer. Twitter as a business may stay or die, but Twitter as a type of communication (short, public asynchronous messaging) has proven popular and is here to stay.

The comments about alienating the development community aside, the post just seems to be the constantly rehashed "it has no revenue model, thus it will fail," argument. I don't necessarily disagree, but I certainly don't think this blog post adds anything to the conversation.

If anyone releases a killer feature then Twitter can just match it. But then again it may not all be about how many features an app has but the quality of features.

This is the beginning of the beginning of the end of twitter stories. This is the end of my reading beginning of the end of twitter stories.

The real twitter killer will be the proliferation of smartphones. Who needs SMS when you have HTTP?

Twitter will never be killed, the same way Wordpress will never be killed. Right now twitter has an advantage that will reduce over time as more and more blogging services embrace micro blogging and define a way to share in real time their content with their subscribers from other providers.<p>If I were google I'd be revamping jaiku with a cooler name and start pushing distributed microbbloging as the new platform (perhaps joining it with blogger). The same for Wordpress and other blogging platforms.<p>Twitter will adapt or die. But will no longer have the strict control over the ecosystem it has today.