Dave Winer revisits the idea of building a twitter clone–inspired by the frequent twitter outages as well as the company’s lack of progress in adding new features to twitter (such as not-textual media support).
It sounds like others are thinking similar things. Actually, it may not just be twitter’s growing pains as the main inspiration here–but in larger part its success. Success sparks competition.
I’m not counting twitter out at this time, however. They do have a large network of key users. I do, though, look forward to what other people might build. I just hope that whoever builds out the next infrastructure that they have somewhat of an open platform. There’s so much I’ve wanted to do with ink–particularly in mainstream messaging apps, such as Live Messenger, but the hooks haven’t been made available. The mindset is still one of walled gardens left over from decade-old fights with AOL and the like. The world has changed–if it ever was that way anyhow.
I look forward to twitter or any newcomers addressing this huge expandability opportunity. It’s long overdue.