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.