[smeg]

"His rant doesn't seem too informed"

Worse than that, he seemed to lack some basic understanding of the modern web. The Twitter webpage is not simply a "page" in the traditional sense - it is one instance of the Twitter client app, that happens to be written in Javascript and runs in a Browser.

2MB for a rich client app? Doesn't sound like overkill to me.

[moe]

How would you like it if a new copy of iTunes was spawned every time you click a MP3 in finder? That's about the analogy for the current twitter situation.

I wonder why twitter doesn't simply serve up a static "fake" page for direct links. That could easily weigh in under 100kb and display instantly. Then make all links on that page boot up the "real" twitter.

That way the long wait is at least mitigated until the user actually starts to interact with the page (which in 99% of cases he'll never do because he only wanted to read that one tweet).