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My thought about the Twitter business model has always been that they shouldn't charge for putting information into the stream, ala advertising.

They should charge for taking information out of the stream, like a polling company, or consumer research, or business intelligence.

Not for the stream, but for the firehose. And for specialized analysis of the firehose.

There would be massive value in knowing what everyone in the world is thinking about in real time.

Getting there should have been their goal.



They do this already, minus the analysis. I think the problem is this just isn't that big of a business.


I suspect the problem is more that they haven't found the way to make it that big a business, not that it can't be.

Oh well, if they don't, someone else will down the line.


I don't know why they are not doing the same on their own. Anyways they are doing it indirectly by giving the firehose access to companies like DataSift[1].

[1]http://datasift.com/


http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/ does (did?) this pretty good.




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