Downloader: Twitter employee teases users with "nifty" new features

Friday, April 2, 2010

Twitter employee teases users with "nifty" new features

Filed under: Social Software, Microblogging

Nothing sets off a good round of speculation like a vague, tantalizing tweet from a developer. Twitter's Alex Payne (aka @al3x) set a small fire in the tech blogosphere (does anyone still call it that?) when he let slip the following delicious tidbit on Saturday afternoon:

If you had some of the nifty site features that we Twitter employees have, you might not want to use a desktop client. (You will soon.)

It's a perfect storm of offering information and building excitement without actually revealing too much about what we can expect. Al3x, you tease!

TechCrunch speculates that Alex might be talking about baked-in geotagging, and cites third-party Twitter web client Brizzly as an example of a featureset that Twitter could duplicate. The advantage of bringing things like filtering, location-based search, and more powerful follower-management tools to Twitter natively is that they won't have to deal with the delays or API rate limits that third-party devs face.

Do I think that popular desktop clients will suddenly become obsolete? Definitely not. Will Twitter's web experience get a lot better? Heck yes, unless they try to crowd too many features into it. I'm looking forward to seeing what Alex's mystery features entail.