Twitter experimenting with a lab of its own

LONDON--Could Twitter Labs prevent drunken tweets like Google Labs hinders drunken e-mails? Here's hoping.

Britt Selvitelle, Twitter's user experience and front end engineering lead, said here Friday that the company will soon launch Twitter Labs. The service will let developers create add-ons and other functions for the microblogging site. Of course, developers can already do this with Twitter's API, but this will make Twitter a formal participant in the process.

Selvitelle announced the project at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. He did not offer many details, but it sounds similar in function to Google Labs. Google Labs, for example, launches every few weeks (or sometimes days) new experimental functions for Gmail. The Undo Send feature, which lets people recall an e-mail within seconds of sending it, is one example.

Will Twitter Labs do the same? One can at least hope. In which case, I will be able to recall Tweets like this.

[michaelfidler]

It sounds great, but they still need to be careful not to step on the feet of the developers who have done so much for them.

[gildorluthien]

So basically this is really just an "official" avenue for people to publish their API enhancements to the twitter interface. I use Power Twitter in Firefox, when I'm not using Tweetdeck, and I can't think of any other features I really want. Well, except for the "stupid tweet recall" feature. Actually I wonder if we could get a stupid tweet recaller for other people's tweets that are stupid. But then again, there are alot of people out there who think about this stuff more than I do, and I'm sure that there will be a lab that comes out that does something that i never would have thought of and won't be able to live without.

Hope you are enjoying London.

[Harrison912]

Sounds good. I typically use Twitter to socially market my safety and security web site so I like to keep up with what's going on there. Thanks, Natali.