Feature set? That's trivial. A high school student could write it in a weekend. A text area where you can enter a very limited soundbite-sized snippet of tex

Feature set? That's trivial. A high school student could write it in a weekend. A text area where you can enter a very limited soundbite-sized snippet of text, and a page where you can see what snippets of text other twits have entered. Then add in follow, @-replies, hashtags, and image/video embedding. All of those features are trivial. They're mostly just references and basic HTML. What's not trivial are the scaling and moderation and support personnel to handle millions of users. And of course, building the user-base itself for those network effects. And those are the things that are currently being lost. But the whole thing was never good. It was just what was there. So yes, there could certainly be a (much better) alternative, a blog network for instance, or just about any other social media site. And the idea of it as "the world's town square" is just laughable to anyone that isn't a long-term twit addict. It's never been that, and never would be.