the issue is not simply me not liking avatars, it is a question of how much development effort it would take to do any sensible implementation combined with it's effect on performance.
at the moment each tweet is a couple of hundred bytes. but an avatar pic is likely to be a couple of k, so adding the pick is massively adding to the memory usage per tweet.
you have to spawn threads to download the images. then figure out some storage. unless you want to download them fresh everytime. but if you store them you need some strategy to check for updates.
then i'd have to figure out how to get the cell renderer to actually show the images.
all so you there can be a little picture taking up screen space.

what i might try here is storing the last obtained tweet between sessions. and see if twitter will give all responses since then.
i have considered enabling this and font properties. It'snot high on my lst but I'll probably get around to it.
will see about fixing these minor point
odd that this only effects friends. the renderer rules shuld be sameywher.
don't know what i can do about that. i just use hildon pannableArea. any performace issue would only get worse avatars
thanks