Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and the lead dev on WordPress, has written an important post about the Twitter API. Lots of interesting observations and more than a little telegraphy here! Well-worth a careful read. 

The conclusions: 

1. The Twitter API had a chance of becoming a defacto standard, but it didn't happen, for a variety of reasons. 

2. It sounds like there's a WordPress client coming from Matt's company (unless there already is one that I'm not aware of) that works similarly to the Twitter clients. 

3. It sounds more and more like Matt sees Twitter as competition. Or maybe this is wishful thinking on my part. 

As a founder of this market, and someone who has the ear of most of the participants, I'd like to make a recommendation. 

1. You have to support twitter.com, and this means working with whatever changes they make to the Twitter API. At this point they have the most users and the most influential users. Not supporting twitter.com, for most of the client developers, seems like it's not an option. 

2. You should also support an open protocol, and by open I mean replaceable and simple. I explained that in yesterday's post in response to Chris Saad's piece. There really only one way to go here, and that's a good thing -- RSS 2.0 as the format, and its <cloud> element to add the realtime component. It's decentralized, doesn't depend on any of the BigTechCo's, and isn't owned by anyone. It also isn't controlled by the W3C or IETF, which means it cannot be corralled by the BigTechCo's. It's easy to support, doesn't require a massive R&D budget and is not a moving target, and cannot become a moving target.  

You must have a route-around of the dominance of the big vendors if the smaller independent and open source projects are to have a chance in the market.