Great article on the use of Twitter data as a predictive tool for financial markets, consumer product research, and politics by incorporating data analytics techniques (my apologies if Dellarocas has covered this in his class already).
While the Twitter user base is still relatively small in comparison to Facebook (200 million users, with only about 100 million active), the general predictive power is there, and could only improve if the service ever goes mainstream (the article reminds us that only a small cross-section of society actually uses Twitter).
I've always wondered what the business model for Twitter actually is (maybe I still do), but this article at least gives some insight into how it could be utilized in the future. How long do you think until Facebook and Google go down this path as well (if they haven't already)?
