Do we need Twitter to tweet?

As Twitter is moving towards ‘new’ Twitter and they start feeling the pressure to monetize, for example via sponsored Tweets, the platform may make the world an even better place, or not? Will all these extras and commercial messages decrease the user experience and move it away from where it is good at and why people started using it in the first place?

This makes me wonder, do we need Twitter to tweet? Are there other options, for example in the peer-to-peer sense, to make tweeting a general functionality available for everyone and not being controlled by someone? People can use their own clients or portals (maybe with or without advertising), but the tweeting itself would (could/should) be a basic service implemented via some communication protocol. (Okay, here I move beyond my expertise, but I hope you get the idea ;-)