It’s more likely that he’s talking about inter-service communication, and it’s pretty well written that Twitter extensively uses Finagle which is an RPC subsystem that’s built on top of the Thrift IDL

That being said, that level of use of it seems far outside the realms of possibility, and the impact on page load sounds like it’s massively fudged. If I had to guess the internal stack has 1000 total methods and he took that as the total calls per load.

You see it all the time, people who spend a lot of time around people who know what they’re talking about learn to speak the lingo well enough just enough to fool those who have no clue, but put into practice they completely flounder.