[mgrouchy]

That is exactly what I meant, and that was exactly my point. Twitter wants to become a service provider. It seems it doesn't care so much about you visiting the site as much as it cares about you using the service it provides.

How this translates into twitter making money, we don't know yet, but it seems like it is the direction they are going with Chirp( http://chirp.twitter.com/ ) and with talk of giving more developers access to the firehose.