Re-sourcing Twitter

Quite a few people talking this weekend about Twitter the service being too important to be left to Twitter the company, and calls for an Open Source surround and secure strategy. Interesting thoughts from Hank Williams re such a service, "Twitshadow":

Technically, Twitter is ripe for destruction by open sourcers. It is a super simple API. It is loved by lots of really smart people that definitely have the intellect, the means, and the motivation to create Twitshadow. In fact open source will tend to be far more effective a development model for something like Twitter than closed source, in large part because a proper solution to this is a very pure computer science problem. This means the open source community will almost certainly be more clever about the solution that one tiny closed source company because there will be lots of heads focused on an easy to understand problem.

I can't see any of the commentators bringing up a peer to peer model yet, seems to me that has legs though, as it transfers the operating costs to the users. Also don't see why Skype can't do something like this. Anyway;

The lesson from all of this may be that communications apps can't live without an open API, But they can't live with them either. Of course I have been skeptical that any communication app can make money, and particularly Twitter, but I could not envision that they would and could be undermined as a platform like this. It is truly astonishing to watch.

The other lesson is that no "next gen" service creator will build itself in such a way that this value extraction can potentially happen again, if it is hoping for funding. Here endeth the 2.0 dream, killed, ironically enough, by Open Source dynamics?

The other thing I'd note is outside of the small circle of early adopter Chatterati, very few people have ever heard of Twitter, compared to say IM or Facebook or Skype, so I think the point all the weekend chatterers may have missed is that rather than an open source play, this could well be executed by a current "comms 2.0" incumbent instead. After all, some think Facebook's transaction messaging is the best thing since (instead of) FriendFeed for example.