So when Twitter allows its users to decide for themselves how they want to use the service, and plans their development around those ideas, it works really well:

With Twitter having made its way to the mainstream, one early tweeting convention has brought a nerdy flavor along for the ride. It can be a bit jarring to come across Heidi Montag tweeting about her “#superficial_album,” using the pound sign to make her tweets more likely to appear in searches and become trending topics. Though we might forget where that # originated, the record shows where credit is due — and it’s to an individual Twitter user.

Se also retweets.

On the other hand, when Twitter decides it knows best, and tries to force its users to use the service in a particular way, it tends to go less well.

Twitter’s official iPhone app, formerly Loren Brichter’s Tweetie and an otherwise awesome client, got a lot of negative reactions from the recent addition of the Quick Bar, a mandatory trending-topics banner on top of the tweet list. A lot of people really hate it, calling it the “dickbar” and often abandoning the Twitter app entirely because of it. Its initial implementation as a floating overlay over anything you were doing in the app was far worse. Now, it’s just at the top of the main timeline, and it scrolls with the list. But it’s still offensive to most people who hated its debut, because making it scroll with the list didn’t solve the problem of it being there and being mandatory.

All I’m saying is that had Twitter learned anything from its own history, it probably wouldn’t have foisted a watered down dickbar -a dickbutton, if you will - on the top icon level of the official iPhone app. I’m guessing it also would have thought twice before deciding it didn’t want users to be able to see their retweets in a single place. That’s all I’m saying.

Is it time for Apple to make good on its promise of deep Twitter integration, and provide an iOS level Twitter reader?