The thing is, I don't see any effort by Twitter to try to separate the inband metadata, except for what they did with in_reply_to (which continues to have problems). They should have done exactly the same for hashtags, URLs, and pictures a long time ago. As a result, URL shorteners have spread across the web like a disease and tweets are #goddamn #liketotally #nearunreadable http://bit.ly/mjSZ1G now, unless you have a client that gets rid of the junk for you. I don't see the top-down, platform-level vision from Twitter about how they'll innovate and make the UX better, instead I just see them sucking up all the startups that built products around their service.
You can make a better UX for a broadcasting service than by having people squeeze more characters in by switching to a tinier URL shortener and using sillier hashtags. I'm hoping to see some movement that actually indicates they know what a problem this is.