I’m still trying to “get” Twitter. Wall Street doesn’t seem to get Twitter either. And for that matter, I’m not even sure that Twitter gets what Twitter is.

For me, part of it is the user experience. Even with the acquisition of Tweetie and Tweetdeck and recent enhancements to the current official iOS apps, twitter seems focused on the browser experience via their website. While this might work for Facebook — I just don’t see this ever working for Twitter.

Facebook is a walled garden. Users expect to log into their account, they expect content from a select set of sources, and they expect their content to be carefully distributed to their “friends” that they’ve connect with.

Twitter is something completely different. It’s not a walled garden, but more like the town square where anyone can stand on a soap box and talk — and anyone can choose to listen. This choice to broadcast publicly, or consume is the key to Twitter. This choice, coupled with the rise of Twitter via third party clients (Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Twitteriffic, Tweetbot, etc…) is critical to the success of Twitter.

Unfortunately Twitter has consciously moved to kill off their third party client ecosystem — and the effects show. As a user today I have the option of using Tweetbot (which gives a good iPhone and OSX experience, but a lagging iPad app), Twitteriffic (which gives a good iPhone and iPad experience, but a terrible OSX one), or maybe even the native Twitter tools which still do not sync stream markers across platforms. Try consuming a follower stream of any size without this functionality — it will make you crazy.

As Twitter continues to push for revenue (which let’s face it will come from advertising) it makes sense for them to marginalize and eliminate competitive UIs, and it makes sense to maintain a common user experience across platforms. I just don’t know if this will work for Twitter long term. If I was sitting at the conference table I’d push for Twitter to open up third party clients provided that they a) provide the same basic Twitter functionality (Tweet, RT, DM, etc…), b) do not insert their own advertising, and c) do not filter out the Twitter advertising and promoted tweets. I’m really curious what the argument against this would be.