Why doesn't twitter do these "smartening" things and make the experience more engaging and useful? Might even charge money for it!

I think they've held off and even cut some features until the core product completely works & the uptime issue is solved.

It's been good lately, except the search is having issues.

Agreed, which is hopefully a sign of features to come.

During the summer it was awful.

Their strategy is to be open enough so others can do the work for them.

If they're going with the platform strategy, I'll offer an analogy: Windows has basic features built in like Notepad and Calculator, but that doesn't mean others can come along and build a much better implementation of these programs.

I fear they're running the risk of creating a platform that's too "bland".

[I like TipJoy BTW :) ]

Their strategy isn't really very open though. With heavy rate limiting and lack of a decent auth mechanism it's pretty sucky. I really don't like having to store a user's password.

Once twitter have OAuth and XMPP I'll think of them as open.

I thought it was Twitter that made XMPP a popular topic?

And can't you just use Gnip? http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/18/twitter-plays-nice-xmpp...

The xmpp stream is not publicly available anymore.

I think building Firefox addons that make keywords clickable is a wasted business. It won't be long before Twitter adds that functionality to their site. You can kind of already do that through search.twitter.com