The concept of user lists? Sawhorse Media introduced those. Retweet functions? That was a user idea that had already been implemented formally by many mobile and desktop applications. And the hot Contributor API is something that CoTweet has been doing for a while. The geotagging API is hardly new, either. But instead of saying that Twitter failed to innovate, let's instead name a few features we love from third-party apps that we think they should integrate themselves - maybe with a key acquisition or two.

Third-Party Apps That Do This: Twitdroid, DestroyTwitter

It's a rather simple feature, but it would make our lives a lot easier. When typing an @ reply or cc'ing a user, it helps to have a cheat sheet in the form of an auto-completion feature that remembers all your friends.

Multimedia Uploading And Embedding

Third-Party Apps That Do This: PowerTwitter, Twitpic

The convoluted process of uploading media to a third party and getting your content synced up to your Twitter account can be frustrating, especially when bugs arise. And not being able to preview images or videos before clicking through is a pressure point, as well.

Threaded Views for Conversations

Third-Party Apps That Do This: Twitdroid, TwiToaster

Being able to see what an @ reply is all about can turn into a trail of digital breadcrumbs 10 tabs long. Seeing a threaded conversation in a single click would be much more convenient.

Management And Analytics

Third-Party Apps That Do This: Bit.ly, TwitterCounter, Tweetmeme, DoesFollow, Twitter Karma

I'm obsessed, you're obsessed, we're all obsessed with follower counts! Not to mention click-throughs, reciprocity, retweets, and all the metrics that make up the statistical side of Internet fame. Real-time measurement of Twitter activity would be worth paying for.

Official Mobile And Desktop Applications

Third-Party Apps That Do This: Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Tweetie, Twitdroid, TwitterBerry

The single greatest opportunity for Twitter innovation (and yes, we're resisting the very strong urge to make a portmanteau from those two words) is perhaps in the desktop and mobile app space. It's one of the most clearly monetizable avenues for Twitter to pursue, and the "official" stamp of approval on an application would guarantee that app's success. Moreover, there would probably be clear opportunities for an official app to come pre-loaded on laptops and mobile devices.

Clearly, there's a universe of features for Twitter to choose from. From social gaming to DM schedule reminders, oneforty is like a catalog of what Twitter could - and perhaps should - be doing next.

What do you think - what Twitter features would you like to see launched in 2010? Give us your opinion in the comments.

The acquisition he's referring to is Twitter's purchase of Summize, a real-time search engine that has now become search.twitter.com. Since that original purchase in summer of 2008, Twitter has made no other moves or indications that they were interested in buying other companies, seemingly more focused on quashing bugs, acquiring funding and partnering with major search engines like Bing and Google. Meanwhile, the ecosystem of Twitter applications exploded, and now includes hundreds if not thousands of apps powered by or integrated with Twitter's service. But which of these apps deserve to become an official company offering?

What Companies are on Twitter's Radar?

Which applications do you suppose have crossed Twitter's radar? Some insight may be found on Twitter's "goodies" page where the company lists a handful of apps, widgets, and website buttons which Twitter users can browse through and download. Here, desktop Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck are promoted alongside mobile applications like Twitterific and PocketTweets.

However, the complete app list seems a little out-of-date when compared with what today's Twitterers are actually using, especially on the mobile front. According to a study from August of this year, iPhone apps like Tweetie and TwitterFon are just as popular as Twitterific - if not more so - as is the Blackberry app TwitterBerry. And the one-time popular Twitter app Twhirl, an Adobe AIR desktop client, has long since been overshadowed by the more robust TweetDeck and similar web counterparts.

Among those web counterparts are the new tools from Seesmic and Brizzly, both of which have been garnering attention as of late, especially when they each introduced support for Twitter's new "lists" feature earlier this month.

But client applications are only a small slice of the entire Twitter app universe. There are also games, blog and email plugins, utilities, analytics and search tools, shopping services, URL shortners and so much more. Plus, there are sites that attempt to aggregate the chaos into some sort of meaningful structure, like the oneforty.com website, for example, often called Twitter's unofficial "app store" by its fans.

While we could only guess at which applications Twitter would want to adopt as their "official" clients or services, a good guess may involve some of the media sharing tools that have been popularized by a number of Twitter users wanting to share photos and videos in addition to plain text. TwitPic comes to mind as one of the top photo-sharing clients and TwitVid or Tweetube may be considered for video shares. These sorts of acquisitions seem to fit better with Twitter's goal of expanding upon the core functionality of Twitter. Where before, the company was content with its simple 140-character updates, recent changes, including the integration of the URL-shortening service bit.ly, Twitter lists, geolocation features and a new implementation of the "re-tweet" structure seem to hint at Twitter's desire to add more layers of complexity to the once-basic service.

More Acquisitions Could be Too Much of a Good Thing

However, Twitter needs to be careful not to add too much. Up until now, the service has grown organically, with a lot of its features and conventions implemented by its own user and developer community outside of the official channels. Bog it down too much with extra add-ons and new behaviors, and Twitter may scare off potential new users who already often struggle with figuring out what to do with the service in its simple form. Plus, longtime Twitterers may also be put-off to see their favorite clients or services ignored in favor of whatever companies Twitter chooses to bless through an acquisition deal. And once acquired, competing companies could wither and fade away, unable to compete, eventually leading their developers to cut their losses and move on.

What Should Twitter Acquire?

Earlier this year, we listed ten companies that Twitter should acquire next. Not surprisingly, some of the companies or their features have already been implemented, including bit.ly's URL shortening service and the geo-location feature we mentioned. Meanwhile, another app on the list, FriendFeed, has already been acquired by Facebook, leaving our original list much shorter and now in need of an update.

Given Twitter's intentions to start a shopping spree sometime in the near future, we wonder what apps will make their list. We also wonder if more Twitter acquisitions will end up being a good thing for the company and the community as a whole, or if it will end up stifling competition in what is now a thriving ecosystem of innovation and development. We hope Twitter proceeds cautiously and wisely in this area - any major unwelcome changes have the ability to alienate the very community that made Twitter what it is today.

Taking a look at some of the other "new" features shows MySpace continuing to play catch-up in a race that may well already be over.

• Sharing music tends to remain the big draw for the site, so it only makes sense that MySpace will improve that service. Now they offer a Music Playlisting feature which allows users to share playlists publicly the same way users have shared songs in the past.
• MySpace has added more than 90 new themes under "Profile 2.0," a feature designed to improve the layout of MySpace pages and the management of the information therein

• In addition to trying to make MySpace look better, they're also trying to make it easier to use. The development team has worked on "systematically changing the way features work around the site." That means fewer steps to get things done.
• Moving MySpace content from online to offline - by printing. You can now print practically everything on the site. Now those embarrassing photos on your co-worker's MySpace page don't have to remain stuck on the site - you can post them in his or her cube.
• More than one person in the TO: line. That's right. Being able to send mail to more than one recipient. It's a feature.
• Show full name. Running neck and neck with the TO: feature.

Unfortunately, for those well versed in social networking there isn't anything new here - which doesn't come as much of a surprise. But it is new for MySpace. And the MySpace community seems to be liking it. As of this writing, the features post was approaching 2000 "kudos" from the MySpace community.

Truth be told, the most interesting part of the announcement had nothing to do with the features. It had to do with a seemingly innocuous comment about the improved usability, "Plus you see less advertisements. Yay :-)" That's an interesting position for a company that finds its revenue by showing those advertisements.

Are we missing something? Is there a more poignant take of these latest MySpace features? We'd love to hear your take.

As avid users of FriendFeed will tell you, Facebook's implementation of FriendFeed's features are nothing but a pale imitation of the real thing. Still, there's a growing concern among the service's fans about its sustainability. Although FriendFeed's founders believe they can still innovate to profitability, we're no longer sure that's true.

FriendFeed is a web application that's very much like Facebook's News Feed, except that it incorporates far more services. Where Facebook lets you import content to your News Feed from a dozen social web services that range from YouTube to Flickr, FriendFeed offers nearly sixty..including Facebook status updates. That's not the only difference, either. In FriendFeed, commenting on and "liking" items causes them to "bubble up" to the top - that is, it brings popular content up to the top of the page. FriendFeed's "FOAF" (friend-of-a-friend) feature also integrates posts from your friends' friends into your activity stream which can expose you to more interesting people who you might want to follow.

Although on the surface, FriendFeed might appear to be just a more robust version of the Facebook News Feed - a News Feed on steroids - the differences between the two go far beyond a list of features. Where Facebook users track their real-life friends' activities, FriendFeeders tend to track news and topics they're interested in. Most have probably never even met half the people they're subscribed to - they just like what they have to say and the things they share.

Wait...Doesn't FriendFeed Need to Make Money?

What FriendFeed delivers is something that's more than just the sum of its parts. It doesn't have one single killer feature that defines it. It is simply a mashup of pure innovation. So what if Facebook rips off bits and pieces of FriendFeed's better qualities? Why shouldn't mainstream users enjoy this too? For what's innovation's worth if it doesn't spread?

Ah, but therein lies the root of all FriendFeed's problems. The innovation of the social "like," of aggregating your web activity and letting others comment on it - all of this, all of FriendFeed's innovation, is spreading off-site. It's becoming popularized on Facebook, where a good portion of the social network's users have never heard of FriendFeed and (possibly) never will.

That doesn't bother FriendFeed, though. Says co-founder Bret Taylor:

"The ability to comment on and like entries has always been popular on FriendFeed, so it is not surprising to see it appear in other places. We have always been focused on building a unique, but open sharing and communications product, and we think that it's great when users are able to share things in more places. While there will always be some overlap in functionality between FriendFeed and large social networks, we believe there is a lot of room for FriendFeed to grow. The problems of sharing and communication are large, and we don't think they will be solved by a single product or company."

While that's true to a point - we certainly don't think Facebook will solve all our communication problems either - there is a valid concern that if FriendFeed can't cross over into the mainstream, they may not make it, especially given our current economy. Businesses still need to make money...and for web startups to make money they need users. Yes, more users than web celeb Robert Scoble and his 25,000 followers. Unless FriendFeed can prove to us that they can, without a doubt, monetize the long tail of technology early adopters, then they need to grow their user base. Can they do this? How? These remain unanswered questions as of now.

FriendFeed's Real Value

But don't get us wrong, FriendFeed's financial success (or lack thereof) is only one way to measure its real value. Obviously it's the one that investors and business owners care about. If that describes you - if you only care about the bottom line and all the nickels and dimes - then seeing FriendFeed's features swallowed up by the social giant that is Facebook may be worrisome.

However, if you measure success not by money alone but by pure, unadulterated excitement, the feeling that you've witnessed the birth of something new -something different - then it doesn't matter how many features Facebook steals for their own. All that matters is that innovation happened. It happened on FriendFeed. And you liked it.

Says Beltzner, the goal is to have tabs that are related grouped together. The change will be landing on the trunk shortly and then they will decide whether or not to take it to Firefox 3.1. (Please do!)

Tabs, tabs, everywhere

The tab ordering feature is one of the little things that doesn't get a lot of attention when people talk about Google Chrome. Instead, the focus is on the WebKit engine, the lightweight feel, the speed, and, of course, the lack of RSS (the horror!). However, if you often switch between Chrome and Firefox, you're probably frustrated when you start opening tabs in Firefox and they end up at the end of a long list of your open sites, forcing to you to scroll to see them.

Getting tab ordering right is not as minor as it seems. When it's right, it "just works" and you don't even really have to think about it. Minor features like this are the sort of things that you can't quite put your finger on when people ask you why you prefer your Chrome browser - you just know that you like it better. It just seems easier to use in some way.

Chrome showed us how tab ordering should work and we can't wait to see Firefox adopt this useful feature.

This afternoon the GMail team announced the addition of a new feature in the Gmail Labs - a Task Manager, or to do list. It's quite an elegant little feature, when it and the rest of GMail work. Below we've got a two minute video tour that shows how the feature works, in case Gmail is down for you and you can't see it for yourself!

Do you foresee yourself using this?