IMO, Twitter doesn’t need to fuss with “friend-management”.  I could even see Twitter abandoning the friend-management business once interface designers figure out that that’s where the business is… ie. filtering/sorting and distributed privacy/security, as well as providing a nice selection of interfaces for navigating your “one stream” of friend activity.

In my opinion, Twitter would be better off tweaking the API to become standard internet protocol for the social web, so that everything rides on “tweets”.  (See the previous posts.)

blech:

Roo Reynolds posted a pair of photos (1, 2) to highlight a feature he says Twitter needs: searching the updates only of people you follow.*

I don’t disagree, but Twitter might find implementing followed-only search difficult. This is because Summize (the acquired company that provides their search functionality) is somewhat disconnected from Twitter proper: it still has own domain (which stayed up on Thursday), for example. Incidentally, this disjoint nature means that people who run private (hi!) aren’t indexed at all.

It’s also why deleted posts aren’t deleted on search, but then another failing actually saves you: the search index is only goes back a few weeks.

Probably the only practical solution in the short term, given I doubt Twitter have the time or inclination to fix these issues, is to fix it yourself. Simon Willison has started running his own local DB, largely for search purposes. It’s tempting to do the same.

* I commented over there, but thought it was worth pulling out for a larger audience.