I think this demonstrates the fundamental problem with twitter. It’s not a business, it’s an infrastructure. The closest comparison would be email. What if email had launched as email.com, and all emails went through the same server? Scaling it would have been near impossible (sound familiar?!) as would paying for the resources to support it without bastardising the service (again, familiar?!). As popular as twitter is today, and as much as I love it, I don’t see it having a long term future without it moving towards being a protocol (open and interacting with other similar services), rather than a one stop shop. And if it becomes this protocol, it looses any remaining business value! Seems like a vicious circle to me.