Is Twitter Everything Twitter Needs?

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Alex Payne, Lead for the API team at Twitter, sent out a Tweet hinting at new features that may render Twitter third-party clients useless.

This led me to wonder… why hasn’t Twitter been able to self-sufficiently maintain a user-friendly interface?

It seems like I end up using third-party clients like TweetDeck and Seesmic more often than I use the actual Twitter site.

While features like List, ReTweet and the less noticeable timeline count in a browser’s tab are features that make it more convenient for users to go straight to the site, the alerts/notifications are still lacking, at least from my point of view.

One of the more annoying things is that Twitter itself still hasn’t developed an application for smartphones, while Facebook managed to update their application and make it more useful than ever.

While reading TechCrunch’s MG Siegler’s article discussing this ambiguous tweet, I was reminded of a great point:

While new features are great, Twitter has to be careful not to make things too complicated.
The core of Twitter has always been its simplicity — if you start tacking on features, that goes away quickly.

Twitter has had much success and with the addition of their soon to come advertisements, I’m sure the company will grow to greater heights and possibly even overtake it’s still growing elder Facebook. This company has the advantage of learning from other social networks (i.e. MySpace), and has the opportunity to integrate the strong points, while avoiding the mistakes. They simply need to keep in mind that they are seen by most as a unique social networking experience and avoid the temptation to be like others.