“As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.”

“Last week I decided to rewrite the Twitter.com front-end on Google App Engine to incorporate modern front-end programming best practices, exceptional performance, and establish a solid platform for further development.” Niall *really* has a lot of time on his hands…