[tzury]

Well, I measured that with chrome and it wasn't 2MB rather ~450 KB.

Talking about 140 chars is irrelevant, a tweet, is a 140 (unicode) chars handler for a (mini social) graph, and this is how we should look at it.

In that particular page he's talking about[1] there are 10 profiles info (status owner + 9 retweeters) embedded within the page so when you click on a profile thumbnail you get the profile modal with some basic info and "Follow" button etc.

381Kb out of those 450 belongs to his own background image [2].

In other words, twitter does a very good job at making their service fast and speedy.

1. https://twitter.com/#!/bos31337/status/172156922491969536

2. https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_background_images/9706...