You're right that the protocol is nothing fancy, and that's what makes the 'plumbing' the most important factor. Twitter could be implemented as a pub/sub messa

You're right that the protocol is nothing fancy, and that's what makes the 'plumbing' the most important factor. Twitter could be implemented as a pub/sub message queue. That's cool, but nobody would use it if there weren't a nice client and a controlled network to use it on.