Or maybe you expect twitter to write a rfc about its api, which for obvious economic and strategic reasons they don't want to open? WhatsApp maybe? How would benefit them to have 3rd party clients they wouldn't be able to control? Or having to justify or change their protocol decisions with an rfc?
I don't understand, I'm genuinely confused, this article sounds very naïve, very delusional, so probably I am just misunderstanding it.
And yes, messengers not working with other clients is one of the most user-unfriendly things they do and something many users consider a bug. And really only has taken off with the start of mobile messengers, before that most could be interfaced from different clients.
I think that's somewhat misleading. MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, etc didn't use standard protocols, it's just that people would reverse engineer them. Third-party clients did just stop working from time to time whenever the providers changed something in the protocol.
Did they all just give up?
Email is open. For some reason people think of email as different. GMail could've provided the exact same conditions and experience when they launched, but only enabled GMail-GMail communications. It would never have got to where it is, never.
And there's obviously no technical reason instant messaging, social networking, etc., should work any different, but for some reason it's perceived as different.