As others have said, thanks, really great tutorial. I don't know whether i'm going to go all the way to backbone (maybe?), but wherever i stop i'll have better, more maintainable JS.
I also have a quick question; why from the 'Creating a view' section, why do we have:
var NewStatusView = function(options) {
var statuses = options.statuses;
...
new NewStatusView({ statuses: statuses });