Centralized services are more successful and for good reason. If you want to use blogging services as a comparison … hands-down, centralized services make the “casual” blogger more involved in their community; the LiveJournal community subcultures are huge examples of this (and I'm pretty sure 6A's Vox has got some nice traffic numbers, too).

Even with the syndication tools, microformats and APIs for blogging, creating a conversation is notoriously difficult – and this problem also carries over for any software that tries to be more distributed, like identi.ca. It's much easier to innovate when you already control the stack and the one API.

If Twitter is to be killed, somebody needs to examine the fall of Friendster and the rise of MySpace/Facebook. It follows the same track: early darling (Friendster/Twitter) explodes in popularity while its infrastructure crumbles. For Friendster, it cost them the early lead … for Twitter… who knows?

If anything, another centralized service will bring Twitter down, and it won't be anything that brands itself as a “Twitter killer.” (Facebook and MySpace *never* posed themselves as “Friendster killers”)

Centralized services are more successful and for good reason. If you want to use blogging services as a comparison … hands-down, centralized services make the “casual” blogger more involved in their community; the LiveJournal community subcultures are huge examples of this (and I'm pretty sure 6A's Vox has got some nice traffic numbers, too).

Even with the syndication tools, microformats and APIs for blogging, creating a conversation is notoriously difficult – and this problem also carries over for any software that tries to be more distributed, like identi.ca. It's much easier to innovate when you already control the stack and the one API.

If Twitter is to be killed, somebody needs to examine the fall of Friendster and the rise of MySpace/Facebook. It follows the same track: early darling (Friendster/Twitter) explodes in popularity while its infrastructure crumbles. For Friendster, it cost them the early lead … for Twitter… who knows?

If anything, another centralized service will bring Twitter down, and it won't be anything that brands itself as a “Twitter killer.” (Facebook and MySpace *never* posed themselves as “Friendster killers”)