[LargeWu]

I'm curious to know what kind of data Twitter has that is that valuable. Just because you have a lot of data doesn't mean it's that valuable.

I used to analyze direct marketing campaigns for a major big-box retailer. They had literally billions of rows of transactional data that they could tie to specific customers, and despite attempting to harness the power of that data, most of their direct marketing campaigns didn't even move the needle.

So, whenever I hear "But, when they finally crack it they will be extremely profitable", I can't help but thinking this is nothing but a bunch of handwaving. I'm sure everybody at Twitter is real smart and they're working hard on this problem, but until they start bringing in some real money, I'll remain skeptical.

[benofsky]

Just as an example from my own experiences: I was able to predict the winner of the XFactor within 1% of the final vote, two hours prior to the final [1]. I've also written an algorithm that can with 80% accuracy detect a news story will come out of a group of tweets. There is a lot that can be done with this data.

[1] http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0115/122426...