[mwfunk]

The poster was stating that writing Twitter was easy, anyone can do it, the only thing Twitter really has going for it are the network effects of having a huge user base and lots of visibility.

I do think that Twitter's biggest asset are the network effects that it currently enjoys, but I don't think that it would be trivial to recreate what they've done in order to create a Twitter competitor. It's not insurmountable, but it's not trivial either.

The original comment was clearly meant to trivialize the engineering. "One guy can do it in a weekend" is hyperbole, it's something you say when you're trying to communicate that anyone can do something in a relatively short amount of time. If there are a bunch of downvotes I would assume they're more for the hyperbole than people actually disagreeing with whether or not one weekend is enough time to write "non-scaling Twitter", which isn't specific enough for anyone to argue about how long it would take to do.

[talmand]

I don't think copying Twitter as a whole is easy nor do I think just anyone can do it. As pointed out, a simple non-scaling version of Twitter could be done by a competent developer in a weekend. I'm a front-end developer and I feel confident I could do it, just not in a weekend.

I fail to see where I am dismissing the accomplishments of the Twitter engineers in pointing out that creating, what is essentially, a RSS feed with a 140 character limit over a weekend would be difficult.

I believe you are complaining over something no one has stated.