Open Interfaces for Innovation and Competition

Just as Facebook, Twitter realized this at a very early stage, releasing an API which enables third party application developers to provide services, features, extensions and derivative applications to enhance the user experience and generate community value.

Today, a growing number of people use Twitter through means other than the Twitter.com page. There are dozens of Twitter clients to choose from, such as Twhirl, TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop to follow tweets from your friends and from anyone on specific topics, uncovering hot trends, special events and issues and enabling you to become part of an elite of the most up-to-date, instantly informed and hyper connected people or simply gaining and edge of information and awareness on any number of topics you choose from, getting insight, opinions, coverage, opinions, references and recommendations from all over the world and all types of people.

You can even use simple apps such as TwitterLocal to stay informed on what people are twittering about in your home town or a travel destination, or more sophisticated ones such as HootSuite which allows you to schedule posts so you can update your Twitter status even when you are away from the computer.

As proven by the success of the iPhone, the Mozilla browser and open source software in general, the competitive edge in Social Networking and the key to understanding and predicting its future, comes from enabling open development environments where creative competition achieves the most pure form of disconnected collaborative creation and replicates Schumpeter endless benefits of the "Creative Destruction" benefits of capitalism, innovation and competition.