Reading his screed carefully, I get the sense this is really about Scoble getting back at vendors that he's covered favorably in the past for not keeping him in the lap of tech luxury to which he's become accustomed.
For instance, Scoble complains that he can't search for older Tweets, and he wants to, darn it.
Twitter search only shows the last few weeks and I’ve asked developers if they can get them but they can only get to the last few thousand Tweets.The last few thousand Tweets! Twitter never promised to hold onto our Tweets for all eternity, or allow us to retrieve them at will. In fact, tweets are the very definition of ephemera -- some with more lasting value than others. You want to keep track of all your Tweets? Copy/paste, dude.
And come to think of it, tweet archival could be a business for someone else. But blame Twitter for not providing this? Ridiculous and narcissistic.
The InformationWeek post is worth a full read...
Oh and you should use the Archivist if you want to save your tweets (you can export to .xls). That's the beauty of Twitter, they've enabled a thriving developer community to build what they can't. Archiving tweets is possible.
On the URL shortener situation (which lead to the piece by Scoble, and the follow up by IW)...how can we possibly blame Twitter for Tr.im's demise?
As Hickins points out, Twitter doesn't owe us anything. It's a free service that we use for own purposes (some of us even use it to make money or build our personal brands). Twitter never made us a promise that a third-party app, which they aren't affiliated with, would stick around forever to save our URLs. That's not their responsibility, just like it's not their responsibility to ensure that desktop clients and other third-party Twitter apps find business models.
Realistically, it's in Twitter's best interest to align with the industry leaders in all app categories, URL shorteners being just one example. Remember when Twitter bought Summize? That deal was so important to defining Twitter's usefulness today (search is everything), but it hasn't stopped the innovation around other Twitter search apps or real-time social search. Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Collecta...etc...search is still thriving, even though Twitter gave its official blessing to Summize.
Twitter and link sharing go hand in hand, and as such, URL shorteners are key to maximizing shared content within the 140 character space parameters, but that doesn't mean Twitter is to blame when one of them shuts down. How many URL shorteners do we really need? If after all the dust settled, and there was just bit.ly, would the world be any worse off? If bit.ly managed to be able to support your shortened URL redirects, you'd survive just fine. But if that doesn't happen, who's to blame if your Tr.im links end up broken? Unfortunately, that burden falls on your shoulders, because you made the decision to shorten your URLs without any guarantees. I do it too...I use cli.gs and bit.ly...and there's no guarantees, but that's not Twitter's fault.