Let's not forget... Twitter may have made the hashbang infamous, but it was originally championed by Google [1].
[1]: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposal-...
Page state and uniform resource location, I feel, are utterly different. Hash bang shouldn't be which user's tweets we're looking at, or which article on Gawker.
Google's examples show the hash bang after the query. Twitter put the query after the hash bang.
Thank you. I agree both of these show a casual disregard for "how the real world works", where not everyone is a "rock star", some are lowest common denominators using the web as best they can (and good for them for even trying!), and some just need to get things done.
Every extra exception you require in a user's mind makes your work and the web in general just that little bit less accessible.
That it is being done for "style" in an arena of notoriously unsophisticated users, really feels like a giant middle finger.
Kudos to Google for their style guide freeing up this particular "exceptions" pigeonhole from a JS programmer's mind, so she can use the synapse to get something done instead.
// Using JS in the real world since Netscape 2.0.