Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit?

Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by bunderbunder on Sunday October 09, 2016 @03:33PM (#12672934)

It's not really about whether or not the site works similarly to Twitter. It's about the neat stuff people can build with something like Twitter data. I don't think you could do something like http://blog.idl.ssrc.msstate.edu/?p=42 with Plurk data and get anywhere near the same kind of attention for it.

For that kind of thing, having lots of users is the key feature of interest.

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Re:Could Twitter Be Better Off as a Nonprofit? by Godel_unicode on Sunday October 09, 2016 @09:08PM (#12674464)

Is attention the goal? I've been struck by the number of articles and research projects that are some version of "we got lots of tweets and graphed them" and have totally failed to go the "so what" step.

Why should we care about this project? If you want to use this to find power outages using Twitter, why not just do that directly with e.g. grep (also, more importantly, are these outages about which the utility company doesn't already know?). Having big data (related: 12 Million lines of text isn't big) isn't cool in and of itself. Doing things which help with that data would be cool.

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