A suggestion for Twitter client developers

The Twitter developer landscape is a pretty incredible and diverse ecosphere. Whether developing on the web or for the desktop we’ve seen the beginnings of some really great ideas and products. Regardless of the operating system you can usually find a good quality client that will typically do the job done.

One of the problems though is that Twitter itself is a changing landscape which makes it difficult for developers to keep up with let alone add new features. This will become increasingly difficult going forward to as more networks, like Facebook, open up APIs that developers add them to their base clients.

This is why I think that developers of desktop social media network clients need to seriously start considering the idea of extending their products by making them support plugins. For the longest times one of the best things coming to desktop applications is this plugin architecture idea as it allows for the easy addition of features, either by the client developer or 3rd party developers, that can extend or improve the program.

For the Twitter clients, and other possible social media networks, this plugin extensibility would let the client developers concentrate on building out a good solid base program that can let them deal with the vagaries of Twitter. Anything beyond that could be handled by plugins whether it be one that could do all kinds of wonderful things with hashtag type identifiers, like #stocktwits, right through to the little things like being able to post the song we are currently listening to.

Just as Twitter itself has changed the landscape and encouraged an active developer community around it so could the client developers create a community around their programs.

So how about it bDule, Seesmic and TweetDeck … what do you think?