Everyone cites Myspace. Either Twitter or Facebook does something controversial and we hear everyone citing Myspace. Myspace didn't lose it's user base due to amazing UX for end-user. They lost their user base due to combination of bad UX and "mobile" user base. Majority of Myspace users were teenagers and by the time they went to college they had hot new social network in form of Facebook, which was exclusively for them. And Myspace was never big in non-English speaking markets.
Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.
App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!
EDIT 1: Grammar
EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.
Every time I go to twitter in a browser I want to punch whoever designed it in the face. It is by far and away the most annoying site I encounter on a daily basis, which is impressive given that all I want it to do is display plaintext.
I've turned that off, because I tend to get notifications in my clients. There's no good Windows client yet though, so when I'm on my gaming machine and don't have my phone handy, I use the web client for tweeting, and I never notice DMs.
I like Echofon a lot. Their Windows client is essentially just their firefox plugin running as it's own app, but it's pretty good.
I especially like that I can sync all the tweets I've read between my Windows machine at work, my iPhone, and my Mac at home. I don't know of any other app that works for those 3 platforms and has syncing.
I'll give that a try, but I don't care much for Echofon on any other platforms.
There is a service called Tweetmarker (http://tweetmarker.net) which some clients are now using to flag your last-read location amongst other clients on other platforms (e.g. Osfoora on Mac and Tweetbot on iOS).
It's also a huge difference in scale. MySpace ultimately stumbled on a comparatively small stage. IIRC at it's height they had maybe 80-100 million legitimate accounts. A mass migration of say 20 million users in a short period of time is something totally different than say 100 million users. FaceBook also had about 50% as many users by the time MySpace hit their numerical peak. So to apply that to Twitter I think some new service would have to grow about 100 million users and then steal about 100 million from Twitter.
Twitter on the other hand offers good UX. They have loyal user base of millions of users from different age groups. They are huge in Asian markets. And they have celebrity users, governments, political leaders, olympians etc. It will be very hard to move entire user base from Twitter to some other service.
App.net is an interesting alternative. And they can disrupt real-time information market. I think App.net can have number of use cases like firehose of realtime feeds for devs . But killing Twitter entirely will be very hard!
EDIT 1: Grammar
EDIT 2: Twitter for me is more than infrastructure utility. It's my primary information network.