Twitter open sources the Mac toolkit that they used to build the Twitter Mac app (formerly known as Tweetie): Until now, there was not a simple and effective way to design interactive, hardware-accelerated interfaces on the Mac. Core Animation can create hardware-accelerated drawings, but doesn’t provide interaction mechanisms. AppKit and NSView have excellent interaction mechanisms, but the drawings operations are CPU-bound, which makes fluid scrolling, animations, and other effects difficult — if not impossible — to accomplish.

While many perceive Java as “that old language we used to build those super slow Applets with”, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is one of the most, if not the most advanced virtual machine in use today. While the Java language may not be the hot new language it used to be in the ’90s, don’t dismiss the JVM just yet. Twitter certainly doesn’t. An interesting InfoQ article discusses the ongoing move of the twitter architecture to the JVM.

When I was 16 I ran a simple website listing free stuff available on the internet. Free stickers, free webspace, free e-mail. My site wasn’t the only one doing it, there were many others. Of course, I borrowed stuff listen on other sites, which was not always appreciated. One of my competitors felt threatened, and started a crusade against me. Wherever he could he badmouthed my websites and removed links.

It’s been quiet here. That’s because the overhead of this place is just so much lower. And less is more, people talk too much anyway. And it’s even accessible if you’re not on it, by subcribing to this.

— dramatization of an actual twitter message The simplicity of twitter is often mentioned as the key factor of its success. Slate magazine (April 2007): But 2.5 years after its inception, is that still “basically it”? We now have @replies, #hashtags, tinyurls, twitpics, RT retweeting and other protocols that we fit into those 140 characters that pollute messages. Creating something new by taking things away is an interesting idea, but if its users start to re-add all the features that were intentionally left out by encoding it into the messages, does it really work?

Micheal Arringtong was nice enough to give some room to Kevin Rose (of Digg fame) to share his insights into how to become popular on Twitter (Kevin is currently the #2 most followed person). The highlights: Let your followers retweet you. Retweeting is copying somebody else’s twitter message on your own twitter stream. Personally I think retweeting is fairly annoying the way it’s done right now. Often you have to pay attention to notice if somebody’s retweeting or has these brilliant thoughts him or herself.

Loic Le Meur on the upcoming new release of Twhirl (a populair Twiter client): i.e. why only bother the people on twitter with the fact that you’re taking a dump, when you can share it with everybody you know on facebook, myspace and especially LinkedIn too!

I’m on twitter. Twitter is cool, but it still leaves too much room for junk. Some people just shouldn’t get any space, or as little space as possible. Clearly this does not apply to me and you, we can handle it. I have a blog on which I can write page-long thoughtful articles. If I wanted to. But I don’t. So I won’t. But people like Steve Yegge, who suffer from verbal diarrhea, could use some lessons in conciseness.