XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK

XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK for a while now. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be a part of their product offering again, if the obvious security and peer-server throttling issues could be resolved. OpenMicroBlogging, while an interesting idea in the abstract, suffers from combo of feature bloat (license info per post/link) and missing core items (no baked-in Atom/RSS feed support, no friend/follow listing in profile) that make it far from a "Twitter-killer" out of the box. Furthermore, the "reference implementation" laconi.ca is a bog-standard PHP/MySQL app. Since many of the complaints about Twitter's dominance stem from frustration with their uptime and scalability, it hardly seems realistic to pin our hopes for a better, more reliable future on a collection of PHP scripts running on a bazillion cheap shared hosting boxen. In fact, WordPress + P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2 http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) seems like a much more potentially-disruptive technology to me. OMB may be much more carefully designed to preserve security, license terms, and privacy, but we've seen time and time again that normal users don't really care about those things. They want a clean, usable UI, and readily-available documentation and support for a commonly-available product.