Mathew Ingram asks “Does the World Need More Than One Twitter?“. Can you imagine if e-mail was only run by one company? How weird would it have been if we’d all been stuck with a CompuServe email address? It’s interesting to see companies like Status.Net build an open source microblogging platform that can serve as the basis for an alternate real-time micromessaging communication protocol.
Mathew also mentions one of my other favourite companies, StockTwits, founded by StartupEmpire speaker Howard Lindzon. Howard is well versed in the Twitter ecosystem having invested in StockTwits, Disqus and other Twitter based apps. Howard has a great post about what would happen to StockTwits minus Twitter. StockTwits is something like Bloomberg built on top of a micromessaging platform that can publish and subscribe to Twitter. Twitter is a great public micromessaging platform, but it is a platform that is continuing to evolve. We’re starting to see the emergence of different protocols including XMPP, PubSubHubBub and other protocols. There is a great opportunity to think about the opportunities beyond Twitter. And make sure you check out both Status.Net and StockTwits, they’re awesome.