Twitter’s real time aspect is a core value proposition compared to other social media platforms. Nothing tells you what is happening right this second as well as Twitter. It is faster than earthquake shock waves. And people rely on that speed for multi hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
This feels heavily overstated. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of "influencers" and such actually schedule their tweets.
I agree that current tweets area important, of course. But I also acknowledge that it is just as often that i will be scrolling through the "In case you missed it" section of tweets. And, I have no idea how rapidly those actually made it to my timeline.
Is it overstated? Since my timeline constantly shifts under my scrolling, often showing me it of date crap, yes. Worse, many posts are ads or trending items that.. no, you would not know if there were seconds of lag in them getting processed.
You could almost argue they the small like counts have to be strong consistency. But, I often get notification of a like well before it shows on my timeline. So it is clearly not strongly consistent.
You have to take into account that the people that Twitter makes the most money off of for real time functionality are not integrated through the web interface.
