No, I don't mean crawl the web. I mean Twitter could just compute the data and calculate the graphs via their direct access to the data. Traversing the full corpus of all data, across all dimensions, including time, including data points not exposed via the platform.

> Given their scale, access to twitter graph data should not have been a problem

Yes, because Twitter could decide it doesn't want to provide the data or do so at costs that make it unfeasible. Like I said, this is the fallacy of the platform economy (which I was quite involved with in its infancy).

If you are co-founding anything that uses twitter platform you should consider what happens if Twitter's biz dev team decides they doesn't want you to exist. This already happened once to the Twitter Dashboards etc.