Microblogging has become too important for Twitter to rule the field.

Well then let them follow the trajectory that SMS has - since in many ways twitter is just SMS over HTTP. Let twitter be coerced into interoperability like the telcos have ( <a href="http://bit.ly/jft6w" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/jft6w</a> ). Surely the necessary technical bits could be plucked from XMPP.

twitter is an SMS mailing list provider. Anyone can do this, but they quickly find that it costs lots and lots of money.<p>For whatever reason, twitter has been given lots and lots of money to provide this service. It's otherwise impossible to compete with "provide a very expensive service for free"

<i>It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure.</i><p>For a given, plucked-from-thin-air definition of "hard", no, it's not hard.<p>In the real world, yes, it's hard.<p>I don't see why the fact that people rely on Twitter should mean that they need to be broken up or opened up or any such thing.

identi.ca.

We clearly need a open microblogging standard where Twitter updates would not be controlled solely by Twitter itself.