Nothing great is Built On Twitter, even though it should be the most powerful real-time communications platform on Earth. There are simply no developer integration features for building stuff on top of Twitter as a platform, and that is absurd and disappointing.
Source: Fixing Twitter
“Nothing great is Built On Twitter”
That quote sums it all up.
Most of Dustin’s suggested extensions are things other people should have built on Twitter. Of course, it also keys into Dalton’s App.Net plan where Twitter should have been the stream and people should have used a countless applications to make the stream more discernible and allow Twitter focus on ensuring the backbone stays in place.
Funny enough, that is how Twitter originated. Others built their clients (TweetDeck, Uber Social, Seesmic etc) and they focused on the core. They lost that direction and wanted to “own it all” like Facebook so fucke over all the guys who helped them on the way up. But they took that direction rather too early.
It should be Build – Extend – Extinguish NOT Build – Extinguish ‘cos you might extinguish your self too if you do it too soon
Take Tweetstorming as an example which is a niche need. My team built (quite objectively) the best tweetstorming app in WriteRack. It pulls and pushes all it’s content from and to Twitter. In an ideal case, Twitter should support it and similar ones rather than making Twitter.com more convoluted with the aim of doing everything themselves.
If Twitter had supported third patrty developers, someone/people would have built a killer app for using twitter to follow and interact live events. That would have brought another set of people into the platform and that extends to other use cases too.
Hopefully, Twitter gets it right because I have come to really find Twitter useful.