To me the big issue is this, Twitter solves a problem that nobody even knew they had (how to stay in touch with and follow people that they find interesting)…so yes it's cool, it's fun, it's easy to pick up and play with…but it's also very easy to put down and stop playing with (and when you do, you don't really feel like you're missing much of anything)…

For something like Google, the difference is that they solve a real problem people knew they had/have (how to find what I'm looking for)…so while Twitter has a 'chance' to one day get to google's level because of all the attention they are currently getting, I think (as you also mention) they have a lot to figure out before they'll get there…

I too am intrigued with the idea of Twitter as plumbing…and I think it's the first 'service' to reach this status (I think that all the other plumbing is basically software or standards so far)…so there is no clear cut path to making it really work long term…which does make it a very interesting case to watch unfold if nothing else.

In the end, I get the feeling that everyone pretty much has the same feelings as you…the VCs feel like there's “something there” with Twitter, they probably don't really know what it is, but they know they don't want to be on the sidelines when it comes to life…

I think that if they could find a way to reopen the Jabber/XMPP interface to general users, that could lead to some interesting stuff (reënable track via XMPP for example, which was much better than where their integrated Summize/Search is now).

Change Control would be a big thing. Make changes boring and predictable. Version the API.

“Change” is not a bad thing, absolutely freezing the API would be terrible. But today it's sort of like building a house of cards, on top of what you *thought* was a stable card table with some thing folded up levelling off one leg, only to discover that in reality you're building your house of cards twitter app atop a house of Jenga sticks, and you can't ever quite be certain that where your building your app will be around next month.

Stability, predictability. I know they're under assault by spammers and bots and the whacko DDOS guys and they'll have to do what they have to do to protect “twitter”, but “twitter” is more than the web site (and I think many would argue: “No twitter apps, no twitter”). They need to find a balance in protecting “twitter” without cutting off the developers who've built of the cool functionality that people thinks makes twitter twitter.

It sounds like system reliability, a predictable release process on
their end, and maybe a general roadmap would go a long way for you.
I'd be interested in hearing what else (if anything) would grab other
lapsed developers.

The cool thing of developing for twitter early on was the low cost of entry, simple API, no pre-reqs or authorizations required. But the cost (penalty?) of becoming a popular twitter app doesn’t translate into better support from twitter and frequently results in getting banned until you can get whitelisted (IFF you can get whitelisted).

Kudos to them for getting the valuation and round, but I’m not enthused about contributing further to their valuation without some sort of commitment back for change control and stability in the API. I have better things to do than to guess which moments in time the twitter API will respond with a “200″ HTML response in reply to a JSON or XML request.

With Foursquare you've got user-provided geo data as the key…I may
be wrong, but I think that even in cases where the device could
support it, Foursquare isn't taking device lat/long, but rather
depending on the user's venue selection to establish geo location,
which means that you've got basically 100% geo data penetration.

In Twitter's case, we know that the Web interface (i.e. no per-tweet
geo data) is a relatively small part of the traffic, but how many
Twitter clients will start supporting per-Tweet geo right off the bat?
[I'm still pretty much all SMS, so I screw up the data set, too.]
Maybe the percentage of tweets coming in with geo data may be enough
for Twitter to work with, but I'm not sure of that.

Even once geo support is built in to mobile Twitter clients, in how
many cases does the geo data actually enhance the explicit content of
a user's tweets? Twitter could build in content agnostic geo-specific
advertising (“it doesn't matter what you said, because you were at
location X when you said it you get an ad for a nearby restaurant”),
but that seems catistrophically ugly to me.

Even with a crude model Foursquare is starting from a scenario where
location is contextually relevant (“hey, come by this place two blocks
away instead of where you are and we'll give you a buck off your
drinks/free first cup of coffee/whatever”), whereas Twitter has to
decide whether or not location is relevant every single time.

As I said in the post: dunno. But please do write a post…I'm
thinking in public here, other people's thinking about this stuff will
be of great interest to me.

On the other hand, I may come across as more negative than I actually
am. In this post I'm largely complaining about one totally unverified
gut feeling about Twitter (that less is being built on top of it
because my vague dissatisfaction is shared by others), and one
unverifiable gut feeling about Twitter (that the company as an entity
is less certain about what it is than it used to be).

Neither of those means that I spend (much) less time actually using
Twitter, it's just that in combination those feelings are enough to
get me thinking in public.

I'm actually pretty bullish on Twitter, it's just that I also think
that what Twitter needs to do is wander through a bunch of dark rooms
in order to draw a map of what our new house looks like, and that's a
tall order.

Maybe Twitter won't be the one to do it, but right now I don't think
that anyone else has a better shot.