Twitter is different from Facebook. Facebook's news feed filters posts. I don't get all posts by people I know nor do I get every update from pages I like. Likewise, until recently, Facebook didn't have a "follow" feature like Twitter does. While Facebook and Twitter overlap in some ways, Facebook has always felt like symmetric relationships and privacy settings while Twitter has always felt like public postings and asymmetric relationships.

In terms of the monopoly comment, Twitter is the one or one of two places where people can "follow" you. RSS/Atom are pretty much dead. Twitter has a monopoly on a network where you can post things and those postings show up in your followers' feeds. The recent spat about Facebook makes it clear that their news feed will never show your postings to a majority of your followers unless you pay to promote it. With Twitter, I see each posting that anyone I follow posts. Twitter became the place to follow people you don't know and to post things to be read by people you don't know. Twitter allows me to aggregate many people's micro-blogs into one feed. Facebook doesn't allow this since I don't see all posts and there really isn't another micro-blog/status message system. If there is another, I'd be interested in knowing about it. However, even if you made a Twitter clone, the issue remains that with no people using it, it isn't helpful. Facebook simply doesn't meet the need that Twitter does. I'm realizing that I've forgotten about Google+, but ultimately any of these closed services are only as big/useful as the network of people using it.

Really, it would have been better if something more open had taken off, maybe based on RSS that would have allowed a multi-network solution. If tweets are public, it's easy to publish RSS feeds of the tweets and for a third party service to aggregate them. Twitter and Twitter2 could be competing services on UI and such and merely read the feeds of the other so that users of either network could follow users of the other network. This could be generalized to any number of competitors. In many ways, this is what FriendFeed was trying to do: allow you to follow people on many services rather than being locked into closed networks. However, Twitter's initial liberal openness might have stunted that. Twitter is so open. Why not build your network on Twitter rather than creating a network of sites?

Companies have the right to change their service offerings. We don't have the right to force them to continue to offer what they used to offer. However, when a company uses a somewhat liberal, open philosophy to grow its user base and lock us in and later decides to switch that bait, it's quite reasonable to be annoyed. Twitter didn't rise to its market power via the new policies. They used very liberal policies initially to grow and make sure that competitors didn't capture that growth. Now that they've locked-in lots of users and competitors have left the market, they're using their new power to act differently. Again, it's completely possible that even with competition, Twitter's ne behavior is the best a company can do to remain profitable and they acting in the absolute best way possible. However, if they had these policies from the start, would someone else have gained their growth instead? If they didn't have this lock-in, could someone else be profitable without resorting to these changes?

Ultimately, when companies are able to exert power over us, it's a bad thing. It's a bad thing when Apple does it, it's a bad thing when Twitter does it, it was a bad thing when Microsoft did it, etc. I'm not saying that it rises to the level of doing anything about it beyond moaning on HN ;-). However, it isn't something that we should be pleased with. It's something that we should acknowledge as sub-optimal. In an optimal situation, we would have choices and be able to move to competitors without hardship and that would (hopefully) lead to companies acting in the most user-friendly way they could while still remaining profitable. Optimal solutions aren't always possible, but Twitter's moves just feel not so nice. They feel like bait-and-switch techniques and that we can't just change services. It isn't evil, it isn't even particularly important - I mean, in human history, it probably won't warrant a footnote. But it's bad for us as users when a company does one thing while it has competition, that competition dies off, and then they switch to another mode of business. Again, that sounds way over-dramatic for what I'm trying to convey which is merely that these changes have come about because Twitter has gained power not due to them and are using that to make their non-important (in the life, health, shelter way) product a little worse for us. However, it's an anti-user use of power that rises to the level of moaning about it on the internet.