Twitter: can a single company amount to an entire open platform?
Reputable news sources on the tech industry, such as Techcrunch, seem very positive about the future growth of the Twitter eco-system:
Twitter is quickly turning into the media sharing platform of choice for many people, despite the fact that it, uh, doesn’t have any actual media sharing functionality. But a variety of services are popping up to fill the need, including countless Twitter-specific sites for sharing images, music, and video.
Twitter seems to be taking off the way weblogs and RSS feeds took off during the last recession. But weblogs and RSS feeds were open platforms, with dozens of companies competing to offer tools. The openness and the competition helped drive the tools forward, which helped the practice of blogging to move forward. There was never a single company that could say “Weblogging will no longer be allowed unless you start paying a fee for our tools” (SixApart tried this and immediately lost market share).
Twitter is just one company. It is only as open as it wants to be. Right now, it is synonymous with micro-messaging (micro-blogging?). But I am doubtful that a single company can come to represent the whole of some online activity. I suppose the nearest analogy would be Google and search, but that seems like an imperfect fit. The highest estimate of Google’s market share is 72%. Whereas Twitter owns 100% market share of Twittering.