It took me 4 years to realize the benefits of twitter beyond self absorbed social micro blogging. Its a real communication platform which allows you to interact

It took me 4 years to realize the benefits of twitter beyond self absorbed social micro blogging. Its a real communication platform which allows you to interact with people around the world. For example the first thing that brought me to twitter was real time updates on a ruby conference. Where else was I going to get that? I can get information before its been posted as news. The great thing about it is respected figures in almost all communities are participating. In a few words they can let us in on what they are working on or take the time to answer questions. If you have a problem you can throw it out there on some hashtag and hope one in a million will respond and usually they will. Its completely changed communication and I cant see it dying. However I believe the micro blogging platform should be treated like email. An open messaging system that can be adopted by anyone and defines an underlying protocol so that we can send messages between all micro blogging sites. I have a gmail account, do I really want to create a hotmail account to email someone with a hotmail domain? If I have a twitter account and someone has an rstat.us account then perhaps I want to message them. I think anyone who did decides to take on the task of turning micro blogging into an open messaging platform would need to look beyond just integrating sign ons. Think of smtp. edit: I missed this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging