So you want to clone Twitter and sell if for millions. But you don’t want to spend a lot of money. What to do?

First, you’ve got to define the required functionality:

• Enable people to post trivial bits of information.
• Make people feel great about themselves by telling them that lots of people are reading what they post.

Conspicuously missing from this list is:

• Display posts for people to read.

Think of it this way: if only 20% of Twitter users read anybody else’s Tweets (not the actual percentage…probably too optomistic!), you can serve 80% of users without the expense of storing and displaying tweets!

Likewise, you don’t have to keep track of who’s following who, because 80% of users probably don’t have a clue who they’re following or who’s following them. Just display some huge number to everyone on the site: “You have 1,734,013 followers!” Everyone feels good about themselves.

So what do you do when someone comes along who really wants to follow people and read what they tweet? Redirect them to Twitter, I guess.