Thoughts on the project:
“Two threads, technical and social, came together for me earlier this year: the technical in Scala+lift and the social in Twitter.
I first heard about Scala by listening to The Java Posse podcast, where Scala kept getting mentioned as a language that fixed many of the problems of Java-the-language, while still running on Java-the-platform – but retaining the ability to use all of the existing Java libraries out there. Looking at Scala led me to lift, David’s amazing web framework, which also introduced me to Comet for the first time – seeing the ability to push messages to the browser was awesome. Back in May, I started to think that this tech could be applied to Twitter. I even thought of a name: Scala + Twitter => Skitter. Then I found a piece of example code in the lift distribution: Skittr. Hmm, someone got there first. 
The social thread, in Twitter, started back at TechEd Munich ‘07, where Gregor Wolf hooked me up with Twitter and I used it to continue conversations with a bunch of people I met at TechEd, and through them met some new people too. A bunch of us took to discussing the features we’d really like to have in a Twitter-like service, and I took this feature list and set up a Wiki page on SDN to record them. That Wiki page was the birth of ESME, and the whole thing rapidly snowballed from there. It will be almost exactly 3 months from the creation of that Wiki page to the first public demonstration of ESME at Demo Jam in Las Vegas – a feat made possible only because we have a team of people who are the best in their field in their respective roles, who have demonstrated passion and commitment to come together and work on something that is fun, challenging and rewarding. Of course, this is partly a self-fulfilling prophecy – it tends to be fun, challenging and rewarding when you have a bunch of people like this working together.”
