I guess some people will take this the wrong way, and it's slightly OT, but it's what I think and it might give pause for thought.
If you're running into the situation that multiple groups are also building what you're building, you might take it as a sign that you should be doing something else. I don't mean not working on Twitter, I mean working harder to find something that's less likely to be thought of by others. That might include tackling things that take longer to build, things that seem more idiosyncratic (more personal), less obviously valuable, etc. Twitter has a huge amount of developer attention. I'd bear that in mind before building any serious Twitter app. That advice is not specific to Twitter, of course. And please don't take this as discouragement, I love seeing what people hack on, and it's great that people take the API and build cool stuff. If you feel like reading more on the creation of value and non-obviousness, I wrote a long posting a couple of months back: http://www.fluidinfo.com/terry/2008/11/10/passion-and-the-creation-of-highly-non-uniform-value/ Regards, Terry http://twitter.com/terrycojones
