I don't use Twitter myself (either to follow anyone or to post my own stories), but I work for a large tech company, and I fundamentally disagree with the article's first assertion:
> Tweets have no value
For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners).
Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.)
For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment.
Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.
> Tweets have no value
For my organization, tweets do very much have a value - they help us measure the day-to-day sentiment of people interested in our company (customers, prospects, media, partners).
Our PR person sends a weekly update of all company-related tweets, organized by topic. (We don't yet categorize by actual sentiment, but that would be fairly simple to do. Since company-related tweets still typically number fewer than 100 a week, it's easy to judge overall sentiment without an algorithm.)
For our use case, at least, Twitter is pure genius. They've taken the natural human tendency to want to share thoughts and ideas with others (in spite of my own introverted personality, studies show the majority of humans are extroverted); they've made it VERY easy for people to do so (there's no guilt in NOT writing a long thesis, since you're limited to 140 characters); and they've built a platform that makes it easy to measure and organize people's thoughts and ideas by topic and sentiment.
Whether that'll allow them to ever turn a profit, who knows.