Some tech blogs who seem to enjoy splashing inflammatory headlines across their homepage (AHEM. Mashable, I’m talking about you here) have discussed in recent days how Twitter’s new Twitter.com redesign is an “all-out attack on third-party clients.” That’s a pretty silly thing to say, considering that if Twitter really wanted to “attack” third-party clients, they could simply pull the rug out from under them at any point by revising their Terms of Service and cutting off access to them via the Twitter API, which they haven’t done and obviously have no intention of doing.

In fact, Twitter’s new homepage redesign, which we previewed earlier this week, isn’t an “attack on third-party clients at all. It’s nothing more than a move designed to enhance the microblogging platform for the dramatic majority of Twitter users.

How much of a majority, you ask? Well, according to Twitter’s own figures, 88% of the people who logged into Twitter last month logged in from Twitter.com. 88%. That’s freakin’ huge. By contrast, only 3% of users who logged into Twitter last month did so from TweetDeck, which is currently the most popular third-party client out there. That’s 3% versus 88%.

Check out the graph:

The assertion that Twitter is somehow “attacking” third-party developers by launching their new Twitter.com website is rendered equally idiotic in light of the fact that Twitter’s recently launched “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter for Blackberry” were a FAR more overt attack on third-party developers; those free applications quickly came to dominate their respective devices, pushing third-party developers for-profit apps right off the list. Last month 8% of Twitter’s logins came from Twitter for iPhone and 7% came from Twitter for Blackberry, far more than came from the third-party clients.

What motivation would Twitter have to “attack” apps that hold such a tiny fraction of the attention of Twitter users? Bloggers are at least getting this much right. Twitter’s strategy from the beginning has been to have loose regulation and light oversight in the beginning, and to closely watch how the community organically creates features. That way features that don’t work fade away and features that do work stick around – and Twitter doesn’t have to spend a dime on them. When the features have proven themselves to work well (like hashtags and @mentions), Twitter builds them into the fabric of the microblogging platform and quickly forgets that it didn’t create them itself.

That’s precisely what Twitter has done with third-party clients – let them take the lead and waste their time, money and resources developing apps they hoped to cash in on, and then snatching up the best and brightest ideas from those apps and integrating them into Twitter.com. It’s brilliant really, and it’s highly effective resource management – but it’s not, by any standards, an “attack.”