I Love Twitter, but ...

I've been on Twitter now for a few weeks - mostly listening and starting to do some mostly work related postings (although I suspect I'm a little ahead of the adoption curve compared to my customers).

I'm loving the near realtime aspect, the short and therefore focussed messages, and variety of people I've found so far.

There are some great clients available on multiple platforms. I really liked TweetDeck but find it fairly unstable on both Mac and Windows. Twhirl looks good but doesn't have an iPhone version, doesn't support groups. Tweetie on iPhone is nice, but phone only. PowerTwitter extension for Firefox is a nice tool for web reading with its inline expansion of twitpics etc. I'm using combination of iPhone, Mac, Windows and Web so I may be a little more demanding than most users, or perhaps I'm not...

So, it looks to me like we're waiting for the ultimate client. What I would like to see is:

1. Same client on all platforms - iPhone, Web, Mac, Windows (others may want Linux, or even z/OS!)

2. Keep track of where I last read to and get me all messages since then. I realize there are limits to the number of API calls that can be made, but this can be worked around by limiting to selected groups of writers or demand paging as moving forward from that point. Each client on each platform should have awareness of that "last read" point.

3. Groups are pretty much obligatory. There are people I will always read, some I'll read occassionally, some related to work, ....

4. Spam filtering, although I don't think this is really something the client can help with. I'm surprised by how many people have chosen to follow me even though I've not really made much contribution yet. I always take a look to see who they are and I don't automatically follow back. Key words I've noticed in profiles that will tend to put me off - "serial entrepreneur", "network market specialist", or anything to do with Jesus or christian (that's a more personal choice rather than trying to avoid spam).

5. Threaded conversations. I frequently follow the links from a posting "in reply to" to see the original question or comment and this is frequently how I find someone interesting to follow. But wouldn't it be nice to see both the whole conversation in a threaded style?

Perhaps there are some clients that can already do the above. If so, please leave a recommendation.

I also use FriendFeed, which I like a lot, and that has a lot of the features - conversations, grouping, in line expansion of images etc. However there is quite a long lag between postings and arriving in FF which Twitter does remarkably well - it's really interesting watching the 6-nations rugby with twitter commentary (esp. see @willcarling) which I guess might have been the same for Americans watching the Super Bowl.

Anyway, I'm still enjoying the whole twitter experience. I know it's early days and hopefully it's going to go from strength to strength.