[borgia]

>I find it astonishing that what is basically a short message broadcast service can generate billions of dollars of revenue.

Basically a short message service? That's naive. Twitter is a marketing platform with 300m people signed up to receive marketing materials, people who also readily provide the platform with the details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on, where they are in the world, what age they are, what gender they are and more. Of course it's extremely valuable.

[lotsofmangos]

I like Stewart Lee's take on it.

"a government surveillance operation run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the Angry Birds generation”

[tomjen3]

That is a rip of of the Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatic...

[lotsofmangos]

Is a different take on a similar joke - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XpvH-j9BHg

The idea that social networks are useful for surveillance and the joke that the users are just useful idiots, massively predates the onion sketch as well though.

[lazzlazzlazz]

> details of what they like/would likely click on/spend money on

These details can only be extracted with very complex natural language processing techniques.

> where they are in the world

The vast majority of Twitter users have no structured geographic location.

> what age they are, what gender they are

Twitter doesn't even have fields to enter age and data. It's all inferred, which makes it difficult to extract accurately (if at all).

[otterley]

Twitter, like Facebook, has beacons on just about every website out there, thanks to website owners who are all too happy to make it easy for visitors to click "like" or "tweet" in the hopes of attracting attention. You don't even have to post a single Tweet for Twitter to know about what you're into.