At the time, the idea of "Twitter as a protocol" was pretty hot during the flurry of third-party apps using the API both for posting and browsing; I remember im

At the time, the idea of "Twitter as a protocol" was pretty hot during the flurry of third-party apps using the API both for posting and browsing; I remember implementing a "post a photo every day challenge" site using hashtag search, and these use cases seemed exciting at the time, creating a "cloud" of posts you could contribute to or dip into. Then Twitter chose to go for the more boring route of monetization via ads and selling access to the firehose, closing up the API more and more, which then lead to the creation of App.Net as an alternative, if anyone remembers that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net