> Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.
Part of why the Twitter platform is so rich with services is that the company didn't insist on filling in all the holes itself. The more open model they followed is precisely what allowed such creativity in the services that run on top of the platform.
A glaring example of how little Twitter has done to support developers since their original API is this support ticket that has been open for about 15 months: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=214
Obviously, those 150 people have been working hard on something for the last year, and providing the best tools for developers (let alone filling huge holes in their API) doesn't seem to be the top priority.
I could be totally wrong on this and API V2 will be out in a few weeks and blow all of our socks off.