I have a serious question about your question, understood under the current regime rules: How does one build and maintain a "global heartbeat of the information age" without return to the funders?

Even if I was an inventor that wanted to build one of these things for no personal benefit, until it was profitable (under some business model), it could not sustain without the goodwill of grant-givers or the greed of investors that knew their money would be returned to them under some sort of risk-adjusted time-based return calculation.

In other words - who can afford to do something like this for free? (Now - I am not a fan of Twitter, so if the answer was "no one", it wouldn't hurt my feelings, but I guess some people think that it is important somehow?)