"Given that Twitter, the company, has no clear path to monetization and no real record of reliability or responsiveness, I think it's legitimate to wonder how long Twitter, the social phenomenon, can keep gaining momentum. If tweeting is truly fundamental—that is, if Internet users start to think of it as a basic feature of the Internet comparable to e-mail or instant messaging, as I believe many already do—then it may turn out to be too important to leave to Twitter. The Internet community has well-established ways of dealing with such situations: either the original owner of the technology hands control over to a non-profit standards body, or the open source community creates a non-commercial equivalent and everyone switches. It will be interesting to see which of these happens with Twitter.

Meanwhile, Twitter's millions of users will keep tweeting away. It's too addictive to stop . . ."