I'm not sure I'm interpreting your phrase "the rules" correctly, but if you mean "the conditions that led Twitter to become what it became"… of course those have changed. Twitter was born in a world that didn't already have a Twitter in it.
To argue otherwise is like saying that it made no sense for my parents to have a second child, because they already had one. Aren't two kids, with similar genetics and similar environment, simply redundant?
Obviously not. You can't duplicate the original even if you try. Nor is that the point. The point is to diversify.
I think Twitter is working fine at the moment – whatever ugly shoe they're allegedly about to drop, it hasn't dropped on me yet. But it's still great to try and reinvent Twitter, just as it was great to try and reinvent Perl, even though Perl still works just fine. You end up somewhere different.
I'm with you 100% on every point you made, but my original point was that the thesis seems to be "the money comes from the users & developers now", and I don't think that's as dramatic of a shift as its been painted to be.
To argue otherwise is like saying that it made no sense for my parents to have a second child, because they already had one. Aren't two kids, with similar genetics and similar environment, simply redundant?
Obviously not. You can't duplicate the original even if you try. Nor is that the point. The point is to diversify.
I think Twitter is working fine at the moment – whatever ugly shoe they're allegedly about to drop, it hasn't dropped on me yet. But it's still great to try and reinvent Twitter, just as it was great to try and reinvent Perl, even though Perl still works just fine. You end up somewhere different.