Although it can look dark to have a monopoly in some space, like Twitter has achieved in microblogging, we actually have the same problem with older open protoc

Although it can look dark to have a monopoly in some space, like Twitter has achieved in microblogging, we actually have the same problem with older open protocols like email and IRC; they can be greatly improved with a redesign, but network effects are holding them back. This isn't really an issue of technical worth or underlying philosophy so much as it is finding the right "trojan horse" that can keep pushing new, worthy protocols into the mainstream. XMPP, for one example, stayed nearly unused for years and years and only gradually started making inroads as a public network after being picked up as an "add-on" to existing popular apps(e.g. GMail). Bittorrent, on the other hand, has been the defacto monopoly in mass-downloading of copyrighted material since it was released, and the closed/commercial response has been app stores, streaming, etc. Or, to put it another way, all of these technologies are ultimately "transitional." We just don't know where we're transitioning _to_ exactly. And we do seem to follow an "open/closed" "centralized/decentralized" wheel-of-reincarnation type of cycle in how we go about reinventing them.