1. Visicalc reigned supreme. They got all the press and had all the market share for their vertical (like Twitter today)
2. Visicalc got complacent and didn't really innovate (like Twitter today)
3. Someone else did it better and took over the market (he's betting that this will happen to Twitter)
I think his "improvements" to Twitter are debatable, but to be fair, he does make the point in the post that the specific improvements aren't what's crucial, just that users are going to demand innovation and Twitter hasn't really done much in that regard.
That being said, I agree with the main point of the article, innovate or die.
I don't disagree. I think there will always be the next innovator/innovation and evolution of ideas but I think this differs and twitter has a strong hold because it is both a mind/marketing share that twitter owns, and a technology share inside of all the apps built on the API. It is the first big web communication platform that used the web friendly REST apis to explode. It was timing as much as simplicity. The complacency though is forcing others to innovate, on their platform, for them and not harming them currently.
I think friend feed has a fair shot. But I also think twitter has a certain style, design, culture that is hard to mimic and others aren't there yet.
The larger the developer ecosystem gets, the more appealing it is to make the switch as easy as possible for them.
The hard part is getting people to use it and build on it and rely on it as a business. That takes years to unseat.
The next twitter will have to beat it on many fronts.
I believe most of twitter success was culture to allow the innovation and try (created from work at another startup odeo), timing and someone leading it that had already been through a sale to Google of blogger.com. The odds that that happens everyday isn't high. It was also the time when RESTful APIs were taking hold which Ruby on Rails had embraced, timing was huge.
My mom is a retired teacher. She recently went back to work, to hear her colleagues excited about how they could use Twitter to reach students and parents.
My Googler friends are excited about the real-time search aspects of Twitter.
My politically-active lawyer friends were all atwitter about the election coverage.
My LiveJournal friends all ship their tweets to LJ through LoudTwitter now. It's essentially a form of vanity posting - everybody writes them, but I don't know anyone who reads them.
My consultant friends use it for networking and keeping track of folks that they may need information from.
My college-student, grad-student, and college-dropout friends use it to procrastinate and waste time.
I'm not sure if this is good or bad for Twitter. They've certainly built something useful, perhaps massively useful. But it'll be really hard to capitalize on all these markets at once, and these are definitely separate markets. Perhaps the future of Twitter is in infrastructure, a tool that people can then use and extend as they see fit.
People always look to explain the past in a way that makes sense. However, that leaves no room for contingencies, even though contingency is a powerful force that plays an undeniable role in shaping the future. Machiavelli didn't spend a chapter on the subject because he was such a superstitious guy.
If you launch a new product and it has the good fortune to create a positive buzz, then you can take over a market simply by being newer and being liked. You don't need to be better, just different. Without a proper data and a thorough analysis of why people actually preferred 1-2-3 over VisiCalc, this bit of anecdotal evidence is meaningless of the future of Twitter.
In essence, a lot of today's tech pundits are basically trying to recapture what Winer had back in the day -- just like so many entrepreneurs are attempting to re-live the soda-drinking, pizza-eating, 24-year-old-with-an-IPO lifestyle of Marc Andreesen.
I wish some of the people on here who don't have historical context wouldn't be so insulting and dismissive of people they know little about, aside from what others have told them. It doesn't make you look smart and snarky -- it makes you look young, naïve, and at least slightly arrogant. (And this is coming from an arrogant 24 year old, so ya know.)