[pumaontheprowl]

> Companies (many/most of the medium and big ones) are desperately monitoring Twitter (Reddit is gaining) because it’s the only window they have into what people say about them.

This just makes Twitter even worse. Only a tiny percentage of the US population are active posters on Twitter. If governments are using Twitter to decide public policy, then they are going to design policy that tailors to only a narrow subset of the population.

If companies/politicians want to know what people think of them, they should be sending out surveys to their customers/constituents. Twitter is not a statistically sound replacement for actual research.