1. Having a bad mobile experience for iphone users has fostered an application ecosystem around twitter–important for any platform. This ecosystem then carries water for twitter, and does a far better job of innovating the UI than twitter could.

2. Twitter isn’t focused (at this time) on the end user experience–they are focused on the underlying platform. They prefer to let other companies innovate around UX while they deal with traffic and innovate around their core platform.

As you say, Andrew, doing a nice device specific stylesheet seems like it would be easy, but it would also ruin (or have a drastic effect on) all the software vendors who are investing in twitter apps (and cementing twitter’s status as the real time status platform).

I’m really glad I’ve sent atebits my cash too.

This would, however, qualify for an additional mode. File an enhancement request with atebits!

As you mentionned, the bandwith used with m.twitter.com is really light. When you download a client, the bandwith usage with this client is huge.

You said 9Ko for m.twitter.com? See what’s going on with tweetie: 25 Ko w/ XML, and let’s admit about 15 Ko with JSON. Also, you have to add the download of avatars: 4Ko (a timeline is made of 100 statuses, so you have to x100 in the worst case).

If you go to another country, your bill is going to explode with Tweetie, just because it’s full featured. If you are French like me, downloading a single Mo of data costs the end-user about €13.30 (it’s a shame btw), so by checking your timeline on tweetie, you already spend in the worst case €4 for a single connection.

This is why the mobile version of Twitter is the ONLY good alternative when you’re abroad and you want to keep up w/ your friends.

I only agree partially. There’s an ongoing app vs web battle and ultimately we will likely see the web win again, but comparing e.g. Tweetie with a pimped, ajax-ified twitter.com web site is just not right.

There are lots of features, that make a real difference. Multi-account handling, drafts, caching, etc. to name only a few. And Tweetie is ultimately faster than using a Mobile Safari based front end, even if Twitter would try to optimize the page for mobile downloading.

The Twitter folks never really cared about the client part anyway. They’ve created a messaging infrastructure, added a lightweight API to it to transform it into a platform. In fact the Twitter.com website only recently got really usable. It’s been a mess in terms of usability for too long.

So Twitter simply doesn’t want to do clients, whether it’s native apps or optimized mobile web clients. They always kept constraining themselves to the basics and left the client-side innovation to third parties.

I think it’s a fantastic separation of concern.

Finally, I’m really happy to get atebits and other awesome iPhone developers my 3 US$. Tweetie is well worth two cups of coffee.