What about Twitter?

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Continuing the Status of the Platform story... 

4. Harold Gilchrist asks if Twitter is a platform vendor, and of course it is, but I'm not climbing into the trunk, just studying it, sort of sticking my hand in there. Sure they may slam the lid (I kind of expect they will, actually) but there's still a lot to learn. And I love their API, as a template for something basic.  

Much as RSS 2.0 was a format used to communicate between various UserLand products that turned into a lingua franca for an industry, the Twitter API may end up having significance outside the confines of the startup that's launching it.  

At tech industry parties occasionally there's talk about cloning it in open source, much the way all the components of Google's back-end are now being cloned. That should certainly be done. Maybe we should have a two-day camp just for that purpose. Hmmmm.