A lot was kicked off in the twitter ecosystem by Fred Wilson's post on Twitter maturing as a platform. 

Many have chimed in - from mainstream media like The New York Times to great posts from Chris Dixon to Mark Suster. Mark Suster lays out a strong argument for laying out the product roadmap. 

And since we now live in a world of opinion and/or expression with sharing for free, here are my $0.02 on that roadmap - Learn from Apple. Learn from Apple's App Store and create one for the over 70,000+ Twitter apps.

Last year in June, at the All Things Digital Conference, Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the opening keynote panel and at the end of it, I asked them [scroll all the way down to the Q & A section]:

Me: "What about an Apple-like App Store for Twitter, where you guys could sort and authenticate apps?"

Biz Stone: I think exposing apps to people would be a good idea. I don’t know about charging for it. We know that certain apps make Twitter work much better for people, and we should promote them and point people to them. “I would like to do that right now. I don’t know how soon we’ll get to it.”  

Apart from creating a beautiful piece of hardware that interacts and just works for all of us, Apple has taken the mobile industry by storm through its App Store, which launched in July 2008. There are over 185,000 apps [a little over 2x that of Twitter which has about 22 months head start] with over 3 billion downloads across 85 million users of iPhone and iPod Touch. Investors like Kleiner Perkins announced the iFund with the launch of the App Store, doubled it with the iPad for developers since they complete the platform and the platform completes them. Steve Jobs made a significant change to the developer agreement and maybe considered mad but he knows only one thing matters eventually to developers - distribution. This is applicable to big developers, like Adobe, as well. Through its detailed report, Flurry asks "Has Apple created a magical new economy for application development start-ups, attracted existing content creators and brands from other platforms, or both?". 

Platforms provide distribution, distribution and distribution for developers building on top of them. There are many other benefits but especially for that small business, for that individual developer, the biggest benefit comes from access to a large user base. The single biggest driver is access to (tens and hundreds) millions of users. Twitter has that but not one developer gets that benefit through them. The developers have grown their applications (and consequently Twitter) by word-of-mouth, their own marketing efforts or just organically. [Indirectly Twitter does help them grow when users talk about their tools on Twitter and through the indicator on each tweet about where the tweet originated]

If they want to ensure that developers continue filling holes they don't care about or those 'killer apps', Twitter needs to create an App Store and make it an integral aspect of their service. Here are certain benefits I see right away:

1. Distribution - to the over 75 Million visitors that came to its site in January. 
2. Payment - that enables developers to easily sell their applications and services on top [in app purchase] of it. Even if they decide not to make money of the 'App Store' as Biz answered, let the developers make money easily. 
3. Ad Network - Twitter also gets an opportunity to drive advertisements through all these applications. Yes, again, like iAd. Many individual and small developers will be more than happy to let Twitter handle the serving and sales of those ads. 

By no means does it mean to be a panacea but its a start to giving the developers something in return that matters most to them, which in turn would grow their loyalty and consequently Twitter.  

Since they are open to acquiring a service if needed, oneforty comes to mind [but seems to have a directory of only 2,663 'twitter tools'] and if not, they should build one fast and oneforty should add other platform apps in their service .. like Seesmic, TweetDeck, ad.ly [which according to Mark Suster, an investor, plans to be a "multi-stream" ad network] which (will) support multi-streams. 

Let (all) Chirps begin (with) the "Nest".