Could Twitter’s New Features Kill 3rd Party Clients?

Twitter is bringing some big changes to their website according to a Tweet from Alex Payne, a Twitter engineer. As a matter of fact, the features may be so good that people may want to consider using the website again and ditch their 3rd party (mostly Adobe Air) Twitter clients.

This could mean an array of new features could come to Twitter.com. There are a few things that could be implemented, such as built in Geolocation, since Twitter already offers it through its API but hasn’t put it in their website yet. Twitter might implement a more advanced search feature into the site. While the search feature is decent, it sure needs some work.  Additionally, they could implement real-time tweets, which would absolutely make a lot of people ditch the 3rd party clients.

However, in order to get someone like me, who uses Twitter a ton, to use Twitter.com, Twitter needs to do a few major things to their website. First, they need to completely revamp their entire UI on the website. The design should be fairly similar to the homepage (before you sign in). It seems like they redid the homepage before you signed in last year, but they haven’t really released any new UI changes. Something maybe that looks sleeker and maybe the option to change some colors around.

The second thing that they would need to implement is a FriendFeed-like style of real time Tweet updates. Not too many people have this right now, but it would definitely be what gets people to switch. One second auto updates in your web browser would be amazing.  The fact that Twitter already notices that Twitter isn’t your main browser window and will notify you of how many tweets you’ve missed is a great starting point.

The last, and to me, probably the most important, also deals with the UI but in a more specific way. I would like to see a TweetDeck-like format, having All Friends, Replies, and DM’s all in one column, and maybe the ability to add more columns.

It is very unlikely that Twitter will implement all these features in their new rollout of the website, but I would for sure switch to the Twitter web client if they somehow make these features possible.

What do you think Twitter has in store for their new website features?