It's realtime, there's a lot of users, and there's no follower limit, so Twitter tends more (than say facebook) to the O(n^2) case where everyone follows everyone.
The trend to label websites "Realtime" as if it's something amazing and new is really pretty funny.
The only real concrete feature I've heard about google wave is that you can see characters as users type them.
Did we just go back in time 20 years?
The technology twitter is simple, anyone could build it. You could likely run twitter on 10 servers max. The brand and community they've built is what is valuable.
> The technology twitter is simple, anyone could build it. You could likely run twitter on 10 servers max.
I'm not sure whether you're being disingenuous or naive.
It's a simple message passing service. It's pretty much as complex as a router that supports multicast UDP. eg not very.