inessential.com: Matthew on Twitter Restrictions
The interesting (to geeks like us) part is this: what system that works like Twitter could exist without a company behind it?
Think about it this way:
Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.
So you standardize on a feed format. RSS would work great, of course, and there’s a ton of RSS reading and writing code out there already — and it’s not like it’s dead. (For instance, just this week Apple released a major iPhone app that uses RSS.)
Any given feed could live anywhere on the web.
It would be amazing if such a thing came to life.