I’d prefer to see an ecosystem of collaborative applications each of which focusses on doing one thing and doing it well, using open APIs and common standards like RSS. I’d love to see a separation between applications that focus on hosting content, be it micro-blogging, photo-sharing, discussion forums or friend list management, and those that aggregate, filter and display that content. Each can adopt whatever financial model makes sense for whatever it is they’re trying to do.

The irony is that’s how Twitter started out, encouraging a large number of third parties to build applications using their users’ data, then shutting down the APIs and killing off those apps once their user base reached critical mass.

I mean, five out of the first six are comedy parody accounts. And a couple of names I’ve used as test data in my own testing too. What’s going on here?