Twitter Adding ‘Nifty Features’ To Website, Will Kill Desktop Apps?

There has recently been a small drama on twitter when on of the engineers at the website tweeted about some unknown but ‘nifty’ employee-only beta features for the Twitter website. He commented that if users had these features, they might not use desktop apps ever again and then added that they will soon have this feature. As a result, there was a lot of general speculation about what these features might be centered on. But the third-party developers who develop apps for twitter were of course not happy about this.

So when asked, this twitter engineer, called Alex Payne, quickly pointed out that these features would almost certainly be available on the public API first, like always. He also pointed out that the beta features that he is talking about are actually built on top of the public API. Finally tried his hand at pacifying them even further by saying that they were just really excited about these features and they would inspire desktop app developers.

alex payne's original tweet that started it all

Twitter as a whole is mainly accessed by people through third party apps or even on site modifications via javascript like pbTweets (sort of like what Greasemonkey does for FireFox). But there are people still who use the main twitter website and some of them are like me who use the main website as well as a client. There are things that cannot be denied about clients — they are often laden with features that Twitter lacks. The reason behind twitter lacking these features is because of the core simplicity that drives the service.

Once you add a bunch of features, like br.st for example, to the main website, it might soon become too bloated or complicated. Too many features will thus spoil the broth for all of us. And hopefully they won’t make that mistake. So what will they do?

Well, that depends. As the article on TechCrunch rightly points out — the upcoming talk about a Twitter ad network is really going to be pivotal to what happens next to twitter. After all, that is what is expected to make Twitter profitable. Search is said to be central for serving ads on Twitter and it sort of makes sense. With Twitter’s real time stream, it would be quite problematic to serve up AdSense-like  contextual ads based on a personal stream, which is too varied in most cases any way. But searches are far more specific and sometimes really valuable depending on the amount of searching and tracking that is going on.

Seesmic is a popular 'fully featured' twitter client

Twitter’s current search features is really very limited and a total lack of improvement might actually be a sign of it being a feature that is being worked upon behind the scene. Twitter already added lists and retweets last year and for a service like Twitter, those really big updates to the service. Geo-location is also a big feature that is mostly in the making right now than totally live. That fact that Twitter is working on bringing more local trends to the service speaks for itself in a way. Plus we all know by now how important geo location is for social and real time services. And Twitter practically kick started the whole real time deal online.

The main hurdle for Twitter is not to burden the system and keep the much-loved minimalism of the service. Whilst lists and retweets were really in demand before they were added, most other extra features offered by clients only may be too much. It looks like Twitters upcoming developer’s convention Chirp will be full of interesting things to report.