[beagle3]

Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".