[Tichy]

Here is an idea for Twitter: they could open source their server infrastructure and make it distributed, thereby massively reducing their operating costs. Then they could offer paid hosting of Twitter streams for people who are too lazy to host their own Twitter servers (the Wordpress model).

One can dream, no? :-)

[dasil003]

They've taken too much investment for that to be seen as a success. They need the control because they need 9-figure revenues, and that don't come easy for social web services. It's a shame really because twitter as a federated protocol would undoubtedly create more true value in the long term, and potentially join the ranks of ftp, smtp, and http as fundamental tools. I'm sure that would have appealed to Evan and Biz, but such things are impossible unless set in motion before the business people get their skin in the game.