With that in mind, I think that programming for social media is more complex. Unlike content that's purely informational and is only read, content for social media is interactive — users read it but also reply to it (eg: commenting on a blog post). While this adds value to the content as the content is now persuasive (and this makes marketers happy), programmers have to deal with the implications of keeping up with this additional content. This means that deveopers have to consider the scalability, flexibility and maintainability of their code or framework. The beauty of it is that modern developers regularly apply an MVC architecture to their social media site or application.

By applying the MVC pattern, web developers are able to:

Have more scalable code that can handle one even a million users. The recent news that Facebook received more traffic than Google, the #1 search engine in the US, demonstrates that scalability in social networking is critical.

Maintain their code. When Twitter released the re-tweet feature, the platform kept chugging along. This is critical for a social media platform that has to support millions of users without interruption.

Redeploy the information to multiple platforms. With the continued strength in smartphone sales (iPhone, Android, etc.), coders are now focusing on transforming their sites or applications for smaller, mobile screens. Instead of having to re-write the entire site/application, developers can create an alternate presentation layer because the other two architectural layers of their site or app (eg: business rules and data storage) do not need to change.

So I think that these traits, including adopting the MVC pattern, are critical for all modern web developers.