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Okay - so now pretty much anybody can create a web site like Twitter. Do any of the open source apps have a full featured API like Twitter's?

The next step, it would seem, would be to "decentralize" it and get it to "just work" like instant messaging services.

Perhaps then Twitter could just abandon its web site all together and just focus on making its API as robust and scalable as possible?

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If done right, I don't think the API would be hard to add in.

The real challenge is making sure that it can scale out to the number of updates and users as twitter has. Making something that looks like twitter isn't that hard.

True. The API is the easy part. Scaling is where the real test will be.

Decentralizing and API are coming soon apparently. The decentralized aspect through http://openmicroblogging.org/

Twitter as a platform was a shitty idea from the start. Imagine all blogs/subscriptions handled by one company. A group of big players and then the ability to host your own will make microblogging stable and popular.

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