Twitter is a protocol masquerading as an app.
Yes, they had a good idea and executed very well, but as I see it, Twitter is nothing more than your run-of-the-mill 4chan board. I still don't understand the draw, but then again, there's a lot of facets of modern society that I simply have no explanation for (reality tv?!?) and have been better off not worrying about it further.
I'm still skeptical and I have used it.
Of course, that woudl imply that the act of removing credibility from something would be "decrediblizaiton" or "decredencing".
Did you understand what the GP meant? Yes. Did you need to point out to the world your complete mastery of the English language? No.
The GP's point was that Twitter is useful, despite it's relatively low score on "innovative new technology" scale.
Something the vast majority of people couldn't care less about. Twitter has, in effect, created a new messaging protocol, in the broadest sense of it. It's accessible on your computer, your phone, even your TV if you try hard enough. It's integrated with hundreds of apps and sites. Technically speaking it isn't doing anything particularly amazing (although the sheer scale they deal with is), but that's not really the point.
Note the irony of this comment existing in a post about the service not being accessible, anywhere. Which wouldn't be the case had it been a protocol.
An IRC-styled Twitter would need some sort of synchronization service to handle twitsplits.
What is great about Twitter is that it allows both the sender and the receiver to choose if they want to interact over the web, through an app, via SMS or even email (receiving DMs). Take the lowest common denominator across all platforms (no subejct, max 160 chars in SMS) and sit in the middle as an abstraction.