I find it annoying too, but I think it is somewhat of a response to "you say it could be done in a weekend, but you're wrong" positions that there have been an

I find it annoying too, but I think it is somewhat of a response to "you say it could be done in a weekend, but you're wrong" positions that there have been an increase of. I also think it's a little bit of people trying to prove to themselves that they can do it, that some of the excuses they had before are just that, excuses, and they aren't insurmountable. It puts a lower limit on the amount of time it takes to do, and it's useful to see that. If you were working something similar, but only had three hours a day to do it, but someone says they did it 40 hours straight over a weekend, it helps other people judge complexity (obviously, individual skill and experience comes into play, but at least one variable gets removed). It also provides support for the position that it's not the technology that is necessarily the hard or time consuming part. If someone can implement Yammer in a week (I pick on Yammer here, rather than twitter, because the business model of Yammer doesn't need to be as scalable as twitter, technology wise, so the first version will most likely get more use before the implementation needs to be revisited), then the impetus is on the "business guy" to start selling it. I've actually been this situation a few times, having had the first beta, production-ready version ready in what seems like an extremely short time, and been waiting for the other half of the team to do their side of the work.