while its true that the base functionality itself is extremely easy to implement with any CRUD framework (spring/django/RoR/phoenix/whatever), the created app would not be able to scale to the degree twitter has been scaled at this point.

vertical scaling only works to a degree, and horizontal scaling while keeping the data as close to real-time as possible is nontrivial.

I'm not talking about engineering complexity, I'm just talking about user value and user experience. I'm sure that scaling a calendar tool to a billion people is non-trivial too.

you aren't the customer

I have to put this on my wall. I made this point to a "designer" in love with the trend of the full-splash intro video. They wanted to use it on a website targeting managers.

Trying the demo on three middle-aged individuals, two did not have the habit of hitting page down or scrolling. So, two out of three did not find the "obvious" content of the website below the video.

   Who are the audience and what are their true needs?

is what we have to concentrate on when we sell products. I am sitting in zoom sessions with individuals that complain about their "wireless" headphones failing / discharging. Yet they happily paid for them, hundreds of dollars. Consumers are magic. I suggested they use a wired headset. They will not spend 10 dollars to buy one. One should contemplate deeply why, if one wants to sell to people like this. Observe them in their natural habitat. They can't explain why.

This is why having a digital product out in the market with paying customers is valuable in itself. You get to observe and measure, and pivot if you're lucky. The userbase is the resource, and the paying userbase is gold.

I'm purely talking about it from the perspective of user value. Whether users are customers or products, what are they getting out of the platform that drives them to use it regularly? Or more generally, what are they getting out of it that they couldn't get on 100 other platforms? Or an RSS feed?

At this point, the answer is just network effect, but that certainly wasn't the case when it was new.

Twitter's selling point was never the application, it's the network. This product has no network, it's just a very basic app.

Also remember that Twitter's users are not their customers. The users are the product.