Twitter is infrastructure at this moment.

Twitter is infrastructure at this moment. It would take any other company extremely long to get practically all newspapers and the major blogs in the world to implement their comment botton under each article, etc.

Even all Chinese sources in English have the button, same goes for (blog)articles in French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and Russian.

There are other microblogs, but the integration of all the world information with Twitter has only Facebook as a competitor (but Facebook has local competitors, whereas Twitter is really global; for all other networks you need to use an AddThis service or the like - except for Delicious and some other linking tools now and then).

Almost all videosites have also Twitter and Facebook linking possibilities.

Twitter and Facebook are now competing as universal inlog services as well; more and more commenting and discussing sites - like Quora - have the link to both sites for making an account. (Some have only a Twitter link, like they are Twitter oriented services and that's making a difference with the less open Facebook world.)

In brief: it's virtually undoable to replace Twitter by any other service as well implanted into the wider system for information gathering.

Reminder: Twitter is also the only service implanted into Google Wave by the Googlers themselves...

(oorspronkelijk geschreven als een Quora-bijdrage ivm de vraag "Won't Twitter just be a money pit to who ever buys it?" vandaar in het Engels;
mocht het mogelijk zijn had ik hier een poll geïnstalleerd over de wenselijkheid van artikels in het Engels bij Ekudos.nl - commentaar hierover is dus ook welkom)