Twitter Sings Its Own Song on iPhone

For its first few years of existence, Twitter busied itself with keeping its servers running, its head above water and the Fail Whale at bay. Coming up with new and creative apps for people to use with Twitter was left up to third-party developers, and they had a lot of fun with it.

But Twitter's growing up, and it's decided to take firmer control of its platform by developing some of its own applications. One of the first is an official Twitter-branded app for iPhone. Dozens of Twitter apps have been available for the handset before, but this one comes straight from the bird itself.

Twitter didn't exactly build this app from the ground up. It recently bought Tweetie, a firm that makes (made, actually) a solid and popular Twitter app for iPhone. I never used Tweetie, but the end result is a solid application that makes it easy to pull off all common Twitter tricks and integrate with several complementary services.