Blogs are like an archipelago of privately owned islands. Twitter is a whole continent. RSS and Atom allow for people to tell the people on the other islands a

Blogs are like an archipelago of privately owned islands. Twitter is a whole continent. RSS and Atom allow for people to tell the people on the other islands about what they wrote but it's a one-way message. For an interaction to occur someone has to go over to the private island. With blogs the entire process of publishing, reading and responding is privatized and fragmented. Twitter is a centralized location that unites publishing, reading and interaction in one faux-public location. There is utility in these kinds of social networks. The issue is that they are not public places. Twitter controls how the information is written and read. Twitter optimizes for their own private interests that have nothing to do with intelligent discourse. In the early days, Twitter was an open platform with a large number of competing clients. Early users and developers invented the core interactions that we see now see on Twitter. Hashtags and retweets were not invented by Twitter. Twitter has since put their API on lock down. They alone have the right and ability to make clients. As a publicly traded company they're now required by law to create products that increase shareholder profits. The evolution of the platform is out of the hands of anyone but the managers of a private company. I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that intelligent public discourse is not as profitable as the cheap and simple thrills that seem to be the core of social interactions on the Internet these days.