Sometimes I don't know what to think of App.net and Patter and the whole fragmentation of feature sets and implementation styles or the incomplete mess some clients offer. Patter is a perfect example for that: Started as a website it offered the creation of chat rooms. You could create public rooms for a specific topic and private rooms. Public rooms could be used by everyone, private rooms only after adding the username to the room. Since you can easily add and remove persons to and from a private room it's a nice alternative to "official" private messages of App.net (or Apples iMessage), where you cannot change the recipients after having started a discussion.

But after months coming and going there is little progress and there is no client to "get it all". Look at iOS: We have beautiful clients like Riposte and Felix with more or less no Patter support at all. BUT we have a full featured official app - besides that it's missing image posting and looks like it was created for iPhone OS 1…

Or take OS X, where Kiwi still does not support images in private messages at all! (Don't even think about Patter there.) Out of nowhere came a Wedge update a few days ago. It adds complete private message support and public and private patter rooms, but does. Not. Support. Images! And it displays Patter rooms in a way that you can not differentiate between private messages and Patter rooms with the same persons:

Why does that matter? Because more clients support private messages than Patter. Reply in the wrong channel and no one receives your post in the client they have available…