Is it cool to be on twitter?
I end up reading about facebook and Twitter more than I need to for social or work reasons. However, it will surprising to know that is more for intellectual curiosity for the underlying technologies and the infrastructure and scalability issues than for the social networking.
I was once bitten by the Ruby on Rails bug and developed a couple of public apps and a few internal applications using the framework. I ended up liking the Ruby language while I was doing it. I am a fan of Rapid Application Development tools (especially for web sites with database driven backeds) that still feel like basic programming. Java with its sea of technologies and packages never appealed to me. I remember reading an early Ruby slide that said if the language and compiler are not fast enough just wait for hardware to get faster. (Music to hardware designers ears).
So I was doing a lot of rubbernecking when twitter was having problems. I am still waiting to try out Scala after I saw the raging debates on the internet about languages and speed that I had not seen since the C, Java and Perl days and read about Twitter and Scala.