The Grumpy Editor's Twitter experience

One thing that's worth noting is that Twitter has a published API, and the general consensus I've seen is that Twitter's website is actually the worst available software for using Twitter's service.

If you consider that Twitter's service is something that is hard to take from source to a working version, it might make more sense to treat it like hardware; we don't expect everyone to assemble their own graphics card from schematics, we try to write drivers that everyone can use to interface with assembled units that some company sells. Correspondingly, you could look at available open source software for getting data from Twitter. I suspect that you could find something at least as much better than http://twitter.com/ as a good newsreader is better than groups.google.com.