Twitter Execs Clueless?

Let’s say you own the most popular microblogging service on the Internet. Let’s say you want to grow that service and make it more valuable to your users (and maybe make money. You wouldn’t complain.). So you’re going to feature third party apps, but you want to feature the best ones.

And naturally, to find the best ones, you turn to . . . your tech blogger friends. Not your millions of users (and thousands of followers), but a tech blogger who you just know is just going to turn around and ask his readers.

I hate to tell you this, but you don’t sound very smart today.

Okay, let’s end the hypothetical there. Obviously you’re much more intelligent than that. And yes, there are advantages to asking someone with their finger on the pulse of your product and access to thousands of active Twitterers.

But why don’t Twitter’s founders seem to have a finger on that pulse? Don’t they have access to thousands of active Twitterers? How is it that after so long, they still don’t seem to understand their own product?

Well, one theory might be that they failed to define Twitter, ceding that control to its users. And now maybe it’s so far out of their hands that they aren’t even sure what to do with it.

But they really seem to think Read Write Web does. Last October, it was RWW polling for revenue models for Twitter. RWW isn’t the only source speculating on Twitter’s rumored business models, and their post wasn’t prompted by Twitter founders (at least, the post author, Bernard Lunn, didn’t mention them).

But really, Twitter? Really? You go straight to Read Write Web to find the best apps for your product?

I really hope the email request was just their last stop to make sure they haven’t overlooked something important—but after so many inside stories on Twitter from RWW, I’m just not confident that’s the case.

What do you think? What are the best Twitter apps? Why don’t Twitter’s founders and leadership already know about them?