
The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web - sant0sk1
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/twitter-gold-mine.html
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petermarks
Facebook already possesses and uses this sort of personal information for ads
and they still don't have a great monetization rate per user. Twitter
certainly has less overhead per user though.

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lawrence
Exactly. This is the same tired argument that we've been hearing about the
FB's and MySpaces forever. Logically, it makes perfect sense. In reality,
nobody has figured out how to actually monetize this sort of activity yet.

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sd
Actually, it seems like the argument is subtly different. Instead of trying to
guess what we're looking for, this would try to answer what we've explicitly
asked about. It's like the difference between your friends randomly telling
you what car you should buy and them answering in response to your question
about what car you should buy.

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Tichy
I think Google knows more about us than Twitter does.

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chime
I think Google knows more about Twitter than Twitter does.

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jonknee
If that's the case Twitter should ask Google what its business model will be.

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mlLK
More often than not I think we worry to much about profitability and social-
acceptability while building applications for the web. As of Web2.0 we're
suddenly deluded with social apps that only harness user's in terms of output,
meaning applications that allow users to socialize with one another via the
apps API; IMHO, this just creates more noise. We need web apps that harness
users/user input for creating better output. This sort of thing can be built
directly into existing APIs or built from scratch where the user is directly
passing vast amounts of data as input. Current web-apps are weak in this
regard, since the input we ever pass into the system are either shouts or
bookmarks.

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bob_dole
the semantic web is more like the gold at the end of the rainbow

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patio11
I don't know about that. If the end user actually got to the end of the
rainbow, they would have a pot of gold. I think most end users would love to
have a pot of gold.

If the end user actually got to the end of the semantic web... they'd have
some extra invisible markup. I do not think I would be able to convince most
end users "Hey, I was going to give you a pot of gold but instead have some
extra invisible markup. You should be happy, you're getting a much better deal
now."

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nir
Didn't get the "semantic web" part - isn't what the article describes simply
keyword-sensitive ads?

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mtw
good insight, but twitter has lots of noise (people doing things) vs the
signal the blogger is referring to (people looking to solve a problem or
people shopping for things)

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justindz
If Twitter started profiling me and providing targeted ads based on what I
say, I wonder if I would begin to provide fewer and fewer useful nouns in my
messages over time.

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mlLK
It's this sorta paranoia that prevents me from signing up for a Facebook
account.

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josefresco
Oh the horror! Advertisers knowing what I like, dislike and want to purchase.
The humanity!

Look I'm about as _tin-foil hatted_ as they come but isn't this what we'd
prefer instead of carpet bombing us with ads for shit we'd never buy?

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swombat
I don't trust anyone who spells perusal "parusel".

