All we need is access to a search based on the in_reply_to field and any third-party developer could build a threaded version of Twitter. So far there has been no acknowledgement by Twitter of any interest in going this direction with the API, but here’s hoping they read your blog and take your advice to heart.

Cheers.

I would argue that most tweets have a short shelf life and threading is useful, but not in the same way that a forum is useful where threads are often useful as reference material.

In twitter, the discussions are not categorized and only marginally tagged by keyword (hashtag). So looking backwards to find something would be quite difficult. This is where the search engine partnerships with Google and Bing come in and add value especially if a search could reveal a complete cohesive thread from all the participants.

But how would a search engine rank all the various conversations that took place for the search term Iran Democracy, likely and influence score of the conversation participants. I think you see the problem.

If the new Retweet feature better enables threading but discourages conversation because it does not allow comments to be added, doesn’t defeat itself?

The only problem I see is that Twitter so far has shown little inclination to bring persistence/permanence to anything past about 7 days (as far as visibility in the UI is concerned). Which makes you wonder if they would start (or even could handle) showing backward conversation context indefinitely.

But I agree that in principle they are not far from being able to do threaded commenting with what they’ve got. In fact, a real benefit over FriendFeed would be comment (i.e. tweet) permalinks and nesting ability (reply to comment), both of which never made it into FF.

Now if Twitter would on such a “discussion page” load in images, videos, and text excerpts, it would indeed look like FF. Too much sanity to hope for? :)