One of the most disappointing things about Twitter declaring war on their developer community means that we’ll see an extreme slow-down in the innovation cycle on cool new apps.  It also means that we’ll need to rely on Twitter themselves to come out with all the cool tools.  This will be, as you can guess, maddening.

Take, for instance, the problem with “curating” the real time web for the purposes of journalism. This has long since been a touchpoint of irritation for people who see the value in getting and reporting on news from their Twitterstream, but are hampered by the lack of ease in sifting through mountains of data and organizing it for the public. Robert Scoble, since just before SxSW, has been beating the drum of “real time web curation” with increasing volume, as well as the lack of tools to easily do so.

This is one of the few areas where Robert Scoble and I are in 100% agreement. I remember during the presidential elections and debates, Robert was hanging out in the studios for Current, where they were simulcasting the debates, but were also updating a crawl on the bottom of the broadcast screen with the best of the millions of tweets properly hash-tagged by the CurrentTV audience.

When we had Nova Spivack on The Cube there in Austin this year, one of the topics Robert Scoble, Michael Sean Wright, and I dwelt on quite a bit was this lack of tools in this area. I asked Robert about his experience at the Current studio. Surely, managing that volume of tweets for that long for that many debates had some level of automation or tools built out.  Turns out, nope, they were manually refreshing Twitter search, and copying and pasting the tweets to their broadcast tool.

So when I catch a headline followed by a fawning description of Twitter’s new “tweet curation tools” by Marshall Kirkpatrick today, I think to myself: “Wow! Finally, a tool for me has arrived!”

Turns out, no, not the case whatsoever. It’s just another useless widget Twitter has created to increase their own pageviews. From Marshall’s description:

In a post today on the company’s blog for media companies interested in using the service, Twitter highlighted ReadWriteWeb’s use of screenshots in highlighting the smartest Tweets about last week’s HP/Palm deal. "But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack," the company wrote. "We have an alternative to propose; it’s coming tomorrow." We emailed the company and they told us what it is!

Robin Sloan, who works on Media Partnerships at Twitter, explained thusly:

The alternative is super-simple: just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool — (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media).

That sounds like a small but exciting feature!

Small? Yes. Exciting? Anything but.

What’s wrong with hitting <ctrl> + C and <ctrl> + V? Copy and paste! To the best of my knowledge, every platform but the iPhone and iPad can do this. I don’t understand how pasting a screenshot or copying and pasting straight text is any less convenient than copying and pasting an embed code.

Twitter, here’s my advice…

…apologize to the developer community for messaging to them that their pot-hole-filling was unnecessary. Apologize by spinning off those acquisitions you just made – you don’t need to own the third party client market, unless you plan on federating out your platform to the public.

The developer community’s help is clearly very necessary. You obviously don’t understand the meaning of the word “curate” in the context of the real time web, if this is your answer to curation on the web.