This is what Ben Franklin said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. 

"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." 

It's an important idea, one that applies not only to revolutions and revolutionaries, but to independent software developers.  

This week a lot of the Twitter client developers are announcing that they now support Google Buzz. Another corporate platform that's trying to overtake Twitter.  

In the unlikely event that Google manages to pass Twitter, the chance that Google will bypass the client developers, as Twitter did, is 100 percent. That's how corporate platforms work. Right now Google needs the client developers to help them try to climb over a very high wall. Later the market will demand that they ship an official client, the same call that Twitter heard. 

The secret for the client guys is that instead of investing in individual platforms owned by huge corporations, they must swallow hard and invest in working with each other. None of them is going to eliminate the competition by doing a better job of sucking up to corporations that own the platforms. Their only chance of winning is if a platform emerges that isn't owned by a corporation.  

In other words, a platform with no platform vendor. 

You know, like the Internet. ">