I've always wondered. On the one side you get the naysayers who don't think Twitter is significantly monetizable at all.

On the other side you've got the people who think the Firehose is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is pretty much a golden ticket.

I don't think I get Twitter - I've never found the service to be at all useful, and I find the 140-char limit quaint and out of touch with how users want to use the service (see: URL shorteners, tweet expanders, Twitter-speak shorthand, etc). However, I am willing to accept that there's a social network I totally don't get that nevertheless rakes in some serious money (like WoW!)

But what exactly is the value of Twitter's data? Unlike Facebook, Twitter doesn't even remotely approach having a representative sample of the population. My parents are on Facebook, my uncles and aunts are on Facebook, along with everyone from my generation - Facebook has meaningful demographic data. What data does Twitter have that isn't almost exclusively limited to "young, urban, tech-savvy"?

As a marketer or data miner, what is so good about Twitter's data that would compel me to pay The Big Bucks(tm) for such a feed? Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like Twitter's biggest proponents believe that the company can justify a multi-billion dollar valuation by providing glimpses into the thoughts of a tiny sliver of the population at large.

More of my immediate family is on Twitter than on Facebook.

I have no idea what value the Twitter data feed has, but the value proposition of the service is compelling: reach interested people with minimal effort, build follower relationships to retain them.

My butcher, for instance, periodically twerps when he's got some oddball piece of beef to offload.

I used Twitter to enroll multiple cryptography classes. I had plans to use Facebook and email as well, but the response I got from a couple twerps filled my classes.

ChiSec, our local meetup for infosec people in Chicago, is scheduled and promoted entirely through Twitter. I use Crowdbooster's scheduled-twerp feature to post consistent reminders. It's miraculously effective.

This "people only use it to track celebrities" thing is a load of crap. Just as many celebs brag about their Facebook likes, but nobody says people go to Facebook for the celebs. The fact is that Twitter has a different, lower-drag interaction model than Facebook (which requires me to decide whether someone I want to talk to gets to see my kid's pictures). It's better optimized to broadcasting than Facebook is.

I'm not an expert on this but here's my hypothesis. People seem to use twitter for interacting with the outside world: celebs, political causes, trends, memes, etc. People use Facebook for interacting with their friends. Could it be that twitter's data is easier to mine for useful marketing information because people make tend to make more explicit connections to brands, causes etc?

Twitter data is real-time + are mostly status updates which are usually indicative of intent or state of mind of a person. Besides lead generation, Twitter paints a different facet of a person where instead of social relationship (FB) its more of interests and current needs/intent. All these characteristics are great for marketers.

I don't see how it matters whether they have a representative sample or not, it just reduces the potential market for their data, it doesn't invalidate it completely.

From what I've seen twitter isn't really a social network. The majority on twitter are just consumers for the "celebrities".