It's interesting that the style of searching you're talking about has remanifested 12 years later in the form of Firefox 3's smart bookmarks. http://ptaff.ca/smart/
What was the name of your program? Does it still work?
For one reason or another, people have an emotional investment in Twitter. Maybe it's just the cutesy vocabulary and artwork, but I like to think that people are invested in the promise of Twitter (that is, Twitter as a product with attractive features).
That, and also how the spectators and critics are investing in themselves by how much they complain and speculate about how each little thing is being mismanaged. It is Twitter, after all.