Why the Twitter cock-up could be the making of the service

Tuesday's very public exposure of the twittter.com website was seen by some as a demonstration that Twitter isn't really up to running a 'proper' service and an indication that Social Media and Twitter in particular is really not a business ready activity.
 
However I think that it demonstrates both a lot of the strengths of Twitter and may points everyone in the direction of where Twitter might want to position itself....
 
The hack on the twitter.com website was really just a demonstration that its possible to drop a very small piece of malware code into even the 140 character limit of twitter messages.  Its something that a paranoid security person might have picked up on when examining their site but in reality it simply shows that no single web site can ever be 100% protected against attacks.  But most importantly it showed that the vast majority of twitter users who access Twitter via third party PC apps and mobiles were almost totally unaffected by the problem.
 
People saying that the problem on twitter.com means that twitter and Social Media are dangerous are actually missing the point. Twitter and Twitter.com are effectively two separate things just like email and outlook express are two separate things. Just because outlook express has a problem doesn't mean that email is bad.
 
The fact that the majority of twitter users weren't affected shows that twitter has grown beyond being a web site and is now a communications service (just like email).  Twitter.com has given birth to tweeting and tweeting is (largely) separate from the twitter.com website.
 
This has two fundamental efffects.
 
1) It gives Twitter a potential revenue stream to licence the "tweeting" technology to third parties either for public services or (most probably) internal company messaging services
 
2) It means that any revenue streams twitter hopes to make from its current service need to be planned around the fact that the majority of its users won't be viewing its home page very often and so revenue has to be found inside the twitter stream rather than wrapped around it.
 
All this makes the new front end to twitter.com simultaneously very important to do properly (to remove these potential security issues) and largely irrelevant (as most people won't be using it!)