Marco Arment had a blog post today on the recent changes to Twitters API. He highlights that “Twitter is not Ours”.

Twitter can do whatever they want.

It’s the simple, brutal truth. Twitter must do what’s best for Twitter. They owe us nothing.

It’s not a public good. It’s not a right. It’s a private, entirely centralized service with no meaningful competition and a massive network-effect barrier to competitive entry. Twitter has all of the power in its relationship with users and developers.

You can replace Twitter in that reference with nearly any other social network or hosted blogging platform on the Internet.

This is why I run my own websites, on servers I pay for and administer, using open source software.