Google engineer, Andrey Petrov eloquantly epitomises Twitter as the Benjamin Button of startups.

Born out of wisdom and insight in our daily social behaviour, completely changing the way we communicate. Soon grown into a heroic Atlas, holding up the world of third-party developers on its shoulders, thriving as the platform rises along with thousands of apps and services transforming the experience. Dusk approaches when Twitter sheds its desire to leave a mark on humanity and finds itself destined to die as a single-feature web-based MVP. A sparkle in a developer’s eye.

Having witnessed the entire journey of Twitter’s lifespan to date, Andrey’s summary really hits home for me. I’ve long been a fan of Twitter, from it’s humble beginnings to the revolutionary approach to global communication. I hate to see them shoe-horn a business model into the established protocol but it was inevitable after many rounds of investment.

Maybe they can pull off a howler by satisfying the many disgruntled geeks but it’s looking more and more unlikely as the months pass. Time will tell.