An open reboot on Saturday 

We're going to combine this week's Rebooting the News with next week's and do it Saturday afternoon live in San Francisco. Jay will be in town for the Online News Association meeting, and of course I live a BART ride away in Berkeley, so we'll meet at 4:30PM and do a 75-minute Rebooting the News special, and you're invited!

We're looking for a place that's very near to the Hilton. If you have a conference room nearby, within say a 5 minute walk, would you like to host this small meetup? We'd find an appropriate way to thank you in the podcast.

Also, please post a comment below if you'd like to come. Can't guarantee how much room we'll have, we may end up doing it at a Starbuck's!

Why no Twitter clients with an API? 

Scoble says the iPhone version of Tweetie is so excellent that it might be the one everyone switches to. I don't know about that, I'm seriously considering a divorce from my iPhone, so I don't care so much about iPhone apps.

He specifically calls out Seesmic who doesn't yet have an iPhone app.

While I use my iPhone for tethering (and won't install the 3.1 upgrade because it would kill that) -- Scoble is tethered to his iPhone for everything. He does all his tweeting and friendfeeding from the iPhone. I find this both amazing and ridiculous. So many compromises. I guess Scoble values connectivity above all else, and wants to travel light.

He really wants a curating application, which I have, it's the app that manages my 40 Twits page. I've released it as open source, and set up an account for Scbole, but it doesn't work on the iPhone because it depends on a bookmarklet and I guess they don't work on the iPhone? I don't know enough about it to say for sure.

Bookmarklets make a lot of things possible. If they don't work on the iPhone then Apple should get to it and make them work. (Apparently they do.)

So Scoble is taking another tack to get what he wants. He's trying to scare Seesmic into providing the "curation" feature for him in their non-existent iPhone app. It would be simple, just a slight variant on retweeting. Maybe they don't want to do it because retweeting will soon get an overhaul. (And imho will finally work as it always should have.)

Which brings me to the point of the piece. Maybe Twitter clients are now mature and competitive enough of a market that they should support plug-ins of their own. It's the way things go. They are pretty much plug-ins themselves, but then so is Twitter a plug-in for the Internet, which is the end of the chain (it's not a plug-in for anything).

If Seesmic supported plug-ins then they wouldn't have to wait for their competitors to beat them in the market before they implemented something. They wouldn't have to worry if it pissed off Ev or Biz, they could just shrug it off as something a developer did (whatever it is that pissed them off).

It may be impossible for them to support plug-ins, if so, many apologies. But in case it's not, it could be the way to answer all of Scoble's feature requests. "There's a plug-in for that."