The 36 corridor between Denver and Boulder was home to a ton of storage tech startups in the first dotcom boom. There’s still a street called “Tape Drive”.
Showing ads isn’t enough. You need to count as impressions to bill advertisers and convince them to trust the impression data coming from third party clients.
Twitter distributes config files across their entire fleet (hundreds of thousands of machines) using git and a cron job. Commit your config change, wait a few minutes and there it is.
It does matter, as it could be used to figure out user growth. Tweets and users now use snowflake IDs which provide increasing but non-sequential IDs which also encode creation time.