Yet, it seems to be the only popular web service which require installation of third parties and sometimes desktop applications to power-use it. That is, using gmail within your native mail client (via POP/SMTP) is nothing comparing to the gmail client itself. Same applies to youtube, facebook, friendfeed, and any other one you can think of.
Those services are all shipped with a well invested web client that evolves and renew itself once in a while. Twitter.com on the other hand, is becoming a mass, or perhaps useless, if you want to follow more than 25 people. tweetdeck seems to be far better client than twitter.com
This support PG's claim that twitter is a protocol, not just a web application or a web service. As such, we can treat it as torrent or any other protocol/hub.
But the point I am trying to make is that we might should look at web startups from different angle. In an era which everyone is willing to move into the cloud, perhaps one should focus about infrastructures and APIs and not on a rich client development, leaving the clients and apps to the echo-system which would built around the core service.
I refer to twitter.com as a demo application for the twitter capabilities, and not the the "twitter". this distinguish between twitter and twitter.com is astonishing to me, and I would be glad to hear more opinions about this.
love you all,
Tzury