Speculation was rife just a few months ago about the adoption of the Twitter API as a de-facto standard for micro-blogging services. WordPress.com, Tumblr, Typepad, SocialCast, and Status.net all added support for the API, and the only change needed for Twitter clients to interact with these services was the ability to use a specified end point. Accommodating different API endpoints should have involved only a few extra lines of code, but despite this, still very few major Twitter clients offer this functionality. The situation has lead Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic and the lead dev on WordPress, to conclude that “the opportunity has passed for the Twitter API to become a lingua franca for the real-time web”.
