Twitter Engineer, Alex Payne, has inserted his foot in his mouth. Actually he inserted a big chirping bird in his mouth and ended up with a fail whale of backlash. This tweet started it:

That apparently caused all kinds of angst among Twitter developers, concerned that third-party apps–such as Seesmic and Twhirl–would become obsolete.

So much angst that Payne has apparently deleted the tweet! You’d think he of all people would know that deleting tweets just stirs things up more–and tweets never fully vanish from the web, as the above screenshot proves.

Payne also had to kiss and make up with those that flooded him with @replies:

Still, there’s one sure way to take the heat off any impending new features for the web interface. What’s that, you ask? Simple! Go ahead and launch the Twitter ads that are rumored to be imminent–that will give users something different to complain about.