"Twitter is building a realtime communications platform that is exponentially more complex than, say, the telephone system (which is a one-to-one system, as opp

"Twitter is building a realtime communications platform that is exponentially more complex than, say, the telephone system (which is a one-to-one system, as opposed to many-to-many)" Talk about not having a clue. So writing a software program is "exponentially" harder than developing a working telephone, running a system of wires, inventing a way to switch calls automatically, the entire touch tone system, running cables under the ocean etc etc etc. Not to mention the telephone industry came up with some of the best inventions in computing - they weren't doing that for their own fun, it was useful because telephones were HARD. Is Twitter hard? Yea, it has some good tech behind making it scale, but the basic functionality is pretty simple.