I’ll be honest, this has nothing directly to do with economies but it just rolled off the “tongue” nicely.
It appears that Twitter’s decline into “burning the brand” is no longer a prediction but a meaurable fact. Naturally this leads to thoughts of “what’s next?“.
There’s certainly no shortage of Twitter work-alikes out there (I’m a user of at least two) but to paraphrase Tyler Durden , “…I wonder if another microblogging service is really the answer we need?“.
Indeed, stepping back a bit could the things we use Twitter for be better served by something radically different? Twitter was originally designed for SMS after all, having bolted-on additonal functionality to the point where it became useful for more than just letting your pals know which session you’re attending at SXSW.
At this point it’s worth noting that for a long time this additonal functionality was provided by third-party developers exclusively; the same group that Twitter now chooses to alienate.
This perhaps provides the most direction for what might truely surpass Twitter. If Twitters fall was brought on by the choice to become hostile to the developers who created its value in the first place, perhaps a successor would have no such weakness by design; not just a benevolent overseer who promises to play nice forever but an architecture which makes it impossible to exclude developers from access to the system?