the tweeterbrowser is based on an idea by wayne abrams. he also wrote the thing.

for technical minds

tweeterbrowser is implemented using the following technologies

• Twitter
  • The Twitter REST API which allows programmers to write applications that interact with the Twitter infrastructure.
  • Tweet# - a Twitter API library for Microsoft .Net 3.5 application development.
    
  • Twitter4J - a Twitter API library for Java application development
    

• Sun Microsystems Java
  • Java Web Start, which provides a way to deploy Java applications to nearly arbitrary platforms from a web browser.
    
• Google API
  • Google's API is used to generate maps showing location information for Twitter users loaded into the tweeterbrowser.
• JUNG Graph Visualization Library
  • The data structure represented by the Twitter user is known as a graph. The JUNG visualization library was designed to service the needs of developers who need to diagram such data structures.