Its really disgusting to think of twitter (or any single vendor) "owning" this kind of function and preventing simple things like allowing text indexing.
It seems like the older internet protocol standards like SMTP work better. At least some of this generation of protocols seems to have played out in horrible ways like the IM market where one or at most 4 vendors have walled gardens and an open standard doesn't win. I guess in the early 70s when SMTP was designed there weren't a bunch of big corporations looking to "monetize" every new feature, just some bearded coding gurus in academia who wanted to build something that worked.
Another thing I don't get is when "everyone" claims that Jabber is a Twitter replacement, they're not in the same ballpark feature-wise :P