> I think there was a time when Twitter could have been "rolled in" to the public Internet in a way that would be more open and free of this grasping for a prof

> I think there was a time when Twitter could have been "rolled in" to the public Internet in a way that would be more open and free of this grasping for a profit strategy. Hey, I remember such a time. I remember when Twitter was the "in" thing, and "everyone" (read: only techies in the Bay area) was using it. I remember how lots of conventions that are baked into the system today (@ notation for user references, "RT:" for retweeting, etc) were organically generated community standards. All of that said, Twitter as a system had major hurdles to overcome to become a utility in the way that you want. But assuming that they published a standard, and created some sort of federated system (e.g. XMPP) how would this be anything but a money-sink? Would Twitter still be in use today? Would Facebook have copied most of what the public wants out of Twitter, and that would be it? How expensive would it be for a major provided of "Twitter Protocol Service" to maintain an SMS gateway? Would anyone actually pay for this service? What about inter-node security? Would we see something akin to the joke that is TLS between SMTP servers?