The challenge was steep: Build something interesting in Flash, using 140 characters or less.

Check out the rules, and the results. Oh man, I was hooked.

I admit, I’m suspicious of Twitter’s usefulness in the grand scheme of things. You’re allowed 140 characters, eh? You can only communicate the big picture; blipverts. Twitter is addictive because it doesn’t require any commitment — it takes 10 seconds to “tweet”. You can tweet like mad. You can tweet at any moment of the day, even from your phone. You can abuse the Twitter API, and post non-human-readable text (such as tweetcode), which will drive your friends crazy.

Having said that… It was stunning to watch everyone create beauty in the face of the 140-character limit. Constraints fuel creativity. Here’s what I came up with:

• The w00t Quilt
• 3D Sketch
• Ghost Marquee
• Sea Sphere
• Sound Effects. Move the mouse for FM synthesis. (Caution: kinda loud.)

Many people posted entries that blew my mind. Some favorites:

• @oskitar: The Day The Earth Stood Still
• @og2t:My 1st Tweetcode
• @flashpadawan: 3D Particle Emitter. Custom 3D rendering!
• @kalisnik: Grass in the Wind
• @piXelero: Inversemapping, and Tweetcoding With Recursion (probably my favorite examples of beautiful recursion)
• @pantaa: Alien Lifeform
• @rmdesign: Jellycube
• @Quasimondo: Hyperdrive

Who am I kidding, I have too many favorites to list. The most interesting aspect was watching personalities emerge, as people submitted multiple entries.

I’m sure I could have crammed more features in my code; I remembered the comma operator late in the game, which lets you shorten

if(condition){doThis;doThat}

into

if(condition)doThis,doThat

You just saved two whole characters!! Epic savings, there. Now I find myself tightening up my “real” code: using multiple assignment, and increment/decrement operators within expressions. Back when I studied Perl, I feared this: You can cram an entire script onto one line, how clever!.. “Clever” code doesn’t seem smart later, when you have to maintain it.

Cheers to Grant Skinner for developing the contest, and to all the judges who are about to wade through hundreds of entries — we salute you. Here’s looking forward to Tweetcoding: The Sequel!