I should note that I don’t find this announcement to be exciting because it comes from Twitter. I find it exciting because Twitter comes with THIS announcment. We are talking about an independent protocol, not some Twitter service. They also indicated that it will be funded as completely independent project and Twitter will become an eventual client. It can also be based on existing protocol if need be. Whether you like Twitter or not is irrelevant, since they are essentially offering to fund a public “software infrastructure“ for social media.