Twitter is in the news again (at least in the blogosphere). Yesterday Jason Calacanis posted that he’d be willing to pay for a premium account on Twitter. Dave Winer then chimed in and said that it could be accomplished without Twitter’s help at all. And then Boris Mann posted a bit of a rant saying that Twitter is Jabber. Boris says:
My only explanation for the Twitter craze is that North Americans are still enamored of anything that can do the tiniest bit of mobile integration.
No Boris, there’s a very simple reason that Twitter is all the rage right now and Jabber is not (and never has been except among geeks) – we need someone to complain to. XMPP is great, but when something goes wrong, what do you do? Who do you turn to? At least when Twitter breaks I know who to contact.
It’s a fundamental problem with almost all open source projects – accountability is lost. This is especially true when you want to use the project for something serious, like Jason does. That’s why companies like Red Hat, IBM and Bryght are the ones we turn to for integrating open source technology. If something goes awry, I know there’s someone out there who will take my money to get it fixed.
Twitter doesn’t have that many users. It doesn’t have really impressive technology, as Boris has pointed out. Twitter is where it is today because it was created by and continues to be run by a corporate entity.
Read: Boris Mann
MasterMaq's Blog 
XMPP is a protocol — not a system at all.
As I explained….Twitter should build on top of it and it would automatically interoperate as well as have all the Twitter only features.
Open interlocking groups of systems…or Facebook building Twitter-like functionality, MySpace, etc. etc. — built on XMPP, all of these systems could federate…
And Skype should have used SIP but they didn’t and things turned out okay for them!
I didn’t mean to imply that XMPP is a system. It is a protocol. In a sense though, so is Twitter. A closed protocol.
I don’t know…I understand what you’re saying Boris, and in an ideal world all of the systems would federate. But it’s not an ideal world at the end of the day.