Open letter to location based services

After a hiatus from blogging, I wanted to announce a new side project I have been working on with some of my colleagues at buzzd.com. The side project is called HashCeratops.org, which I will explain after a brief explanation of how the project came about:

Genesis:
At buzzd, we have been feverishly working at creating a compelling platform built around finding the very coolest places & events around you. Our newest application, on the iPhone, is really great at doing just that, and I am very proud of what the buzzd team has put together. Building this product made us really confront an implicit problem that a lot of location based services (LBS) know about but haven’t gotten around to addressing quite yet.

The problem:
This problem is that organizing the plethora of venue “data” created by all these varying services is a messy job. The industry knows that a high degree of convergence is inevitable, but not easy. All of our individual services can be made better if we can compare public buzzes, tweets, check-ins, or whatever else you want to call it – at the same place. Take it from me - we aggregate over 10 content providers and then merge, clean, and de-duplicate venues - its a royal pain. The difficulty is in identifying what the ‘same place’ really is on different services and content providers. We are in desperate need of some better standards – essentially, synchronization tools.

Industry best practices typically involve matching venues based on a phone number. There are other solutions, but this is the most typical. Briefly, let me explain why this is ‘messy’: Phone numbers change, venues get new names but don’t change phone numbers, venues have multiple phone numbers, or even multiple venues have the same phone number (see Webster Hall vs. The Studio). Similar problems arise with other methodologies. Even geotagged data is problematic: with all the different technologies: different geocoder databases, GPS, CellID, etc. – a latitude/longitude of a business or an end user isn’t as precise as you think - you aren’t really looking apples to apples.

So what we need is a better way to match a place on two different services. And creating a random string of numbers (Webster Hall = 8018765) isn’t gonna cut it. The identifier needs to be simple, something that makes sense to both databases and end users. To put it another way - it needs to be tweetable. There are tons of challenges in creating a great set of identifiers that meet these standards, and you would expect, the best solution cannot really be machine generated – it is, in the words of a colleague, a ‘heuristic problem’. The solution needs to be human.

The project:
What we have done with the HashCeratops project is to build a prototype of this solution. We have manually looked up thousands of popular venues, and picked out our very best shot at a great unique identifier. Our methodology insures the identifiers are unique, clean, readable, and as short as possible. We did this for thousands of venues. Let me tell you from personal experience – it is a painstaking ordeal, but a valuable undertaking nonetheless.

The result is a first start – a database of thousands of places with unique identifiers – and a public, open, community resource where anyone can contribute to the project and access the work that has already been accomplished.

We have made this wiki publicly available: we gave it a silly name and logo, created a website and built an API. Now we are asking the community to get involved. Use it, and contribute to it. Buzzd has given us the APIs to get the project off the ground, and is already using our database of identifiers to create twitter hashtags to associate tweets with venues. We have already gotten a few partners on board and look to make an announcement about it soon.

This is a resource for everybody, but it is only a start. We need help - we cant do this alone. I am excited to see how the project evolves.

Open letter to microfinance

My biggest frustration with my (limited) sense of microfinance is the following:

Connecting funds with eligible individuals is annoyingly resource intensive. Whats more, educating microborrowers on how to better USE that money is almost only a cherry on top, executed individually by each MFI. There needs to be a more scalable solution for pairing training with microloans. What if we could do that using the software/internet business model. Build the right answer once - and then distribute it everywhere efficiently, cheaply, electronically.

I am interested to know if anyone has heard of someone that is building an online school for microborrowers, to establish a curriculum that adequately addresses vocational and financial training and then distributes it electronically (online or through software). I understand that there are plenty of challenges to this idea. I would be interested in building a test case - think of it as a wiki 'school', built by the best academic minds in the industry, that MFIs could use to educate. Eventually, the end user could be the borrower themselves.

So I made a $25 loan on both kiva.org and myc4.com, just to understand the process a little better. There was a major thing I thought about when I was picking out who to make loans to: How do I have any certainty that this person knows how to run a business? How can I tell that they are hard working? Even if everyone pays back the loan - isn't there a better way to prioritize which opportunity you are financing? Do MFI's have substantially more clarity?

In my last job hunt, I marketed myself with my G.P.A., SAT scores, university name, previous employer pedigree, etc. Now I realize that not much of the rest of the world comes close to the same silly resume-building practices that I have become used to. But shouldnt microborrowers be able to 'pad their resume' in an apples to apples manner that could help them be more eligible to receive microfinancing for their project? Couldnt you offer them accreditation in vocational schools to that end? And isnt this the EXACT kind of school that you could put online / in software? At a netbook kiosk in the local MFI, maybe a certain number of hours logged and a final exam to pass. Wouldnt this be a way to get expert opinion on best practices for various new ventures, instead of the entrepreneur going with the 'common knowledge'. I thought of this after seeing a bunch of competing 'jewelry' or 'arts and crafts' businesses. Do this people have any idea how saturated the market might be? I imagine MFIs do provide advice on site - but isnt a online, centralized, specialized authority a more efficient way of doing this than leaving it up to individual MFIs?

Now all the work to put vocational schools in multiple languages and online in an easy to use and secure format is a tall (expensive) order. Moreover, you would have to reinvent a user interface that is built for people who dont know computers. But these are fun challenges. A school like this might have a cost.

But couldnt you use MFIs to grant "student loans" to these entrepreneurs-to-be? And if students paid for this school, you could fund the buildout of new vocations or provide scholarships to existing programs. Plus, the more topics you cover, the more overlap you get on basic business advice. And wouldnt people borrow for education if they thought it would 1) make it easier to raise money and 2) actually improve their business?

I realize my proposal presupposes a lot of things we take for granted in America. But where there isnt a system - create the need with infrastructure.

Open Letter to match.com

Dating websites are growing in popularity, and much of the talk centers around the subscription/ad-supported debate -- but the bigger issue is a seemingly insurmountable hurdle – culture. How to become a part of the mainstream? There is a lingering aversion to e-dating – probably solely because it carries the social stigma of being ‘unusual’. This is a common issue in the social web – how do you make it to the mainstream?

I had an idea: Reality TV. I know what you are thinking – everybody you know hates reality TV. But you’re wrong. Everybody you know SAYS they hate reality TV. But they watch it. And even if they don’t, it seeps into their everyday life. A lot of very normal people would confess to not having ever checked out an e-dating site, but nobody could credibly claim they haven’t watched a little reality TV.

I don’t for the most part watch reality TV. I have watched all of ten minutes of American Idol. But I know who the winners have been. I know the premise of the Real World, and a bunch of “lesser known” ones: The Biggest Loser, The Pickup Artist, The Flavor of Love, Temptation Island, Iron Chef, etc. They are unavoidably pop culture. So I propose the perfect cultural acquisition. The social web on reality TV.

Specifically – here is my elevator pitch. Field a team for The Amazing Race with a blind date set up by one of the e-dating sites. On the Amazing Race, every time they show a team they show the caption Mother/Daughter, Frat Brothers, etc. – here you would show match.com blind date (instant marketing). Much of the drama from this show is on how a relationship can be strengthened/stressed by the competition – I would love to see how a blind date could fare. Better yet, have multiple e-dating sites field teams, and increase sexual tension between OTHER teams by making the couples stay in the same place and meet each other. That makes it a challenge show AND a romantic interest reality TV show all in one. The romance element becomes more compelling to both contestants and viewers because the bonding develops via teamwork through adversity. Plus you don’t have to eliminate romantic interests, like in most romance reality shows. There will be the added element of seeing which dating sites field the best couples for romance AND for teamwork. And this is the MOST important part: Sponsorship won’t be irrelevant like when The Real World cast gets a job ‘promoting delicious Rockstar Energy Drink’. The sponsors will be part of the game, pitted against each other in the task of both fielding an attractive, successful team that more importantly hits it off with each other and not another group during the competition. This will be the cheapest, most sponsored, most interesting reality TV show ever. And it will be educating and engaging your REAL target demographic – culture consumers. This is a low cost, high impact way to market a truly underrated service.

Calling all my readers!!

Please pardon my departure from the standard 'open letter' format of this blog in this post. This holiday season, I wanted to encourage all of my readers to give a very reasonable $10 (each square represents $10) to a charity called the Grameen Foundation.

The Grameen Foundation is a non-profit organization built to replicate globally the success of the Grameen Bank, a microfinance institute started by 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus. Your donation will support the continued development and implementation of microfinance in underserved areas. Unique from other charitable causes, this cause promotes self-actualization of the worlds poor.

To give, please visit www.stoppovertynow.org. Microfinance currently relies heavily on traditional 'big ticket' philanthropists to support new and ongoing efforts. The goal of this campaign is to engage people like YOU to participate and give, no matter how small the amount. The internet has enabled the power of the 'little guy' in making a big difference (most recently in the US presidential election). The Grameen Foundation needs YOU to help leverage that same potential to enable this truly powerful cause.

Add a comment to this post if it inspired you to give!

Open Letter to Pluribo

Pluribo, you guys rock. Your technology is very cool. At very least, I have a good example to help explain the semantic web to friends and family.

Your widget is just so powerful, it seems like it should be Patriot Act-ing my emails and telling the government about me. I imagine your biggest problem with the current widget is just that it isn't that essential to consumers, even if it is cool.

In a tough market like this, I am guessing that like so many other startups, you can only focus on one thing - path to monetization. I wanted to come up with a few suggestions as to how to do it.


1) First and foremost - licensing your technology to a site that has a steady stream of consumer generated content and wants a quick analysis of it.
I am sure you already talked to Amazon; but I recently noticed that Yelp themselves are actually already trying to do a similar thing in the 'Review Snapshot' portion of the page, giving you an overview of reviews. License the summary to Yelp instead of making consumers download a widget to do it. What if you could sell to Yelp a more complex version, but with less categories than what you do on Amazon: like Ambiance/Price/Service/Food the way Zagats does it? You could quickly apply the same categories to all restaurants.
The reason I mention this is that I think your current product might be too detailed to be cost effective - sometimes what gets built is 'what it should be' instead of 'what it needs to be'. You are fixing a pain point, but in some ways the analysis may be overkill for the average consumer (not me!).


2) Market the analysis to consulting companies that would lump in the cost of your service with their astronomical expense accounts and use to strengthen their analysis.
Comp out what similar research should cost. If you do a more shallow dive, across a broader spectrum, it might make you more of a 'market analysis' -type firm.
Build out the broader categories of sentiment - brand appeal, durability, support, etc - stuff that you will be able to use on all products.
What if you did something similar to Rotten Tomatoes? There may be business applications to that, as it would take less time.
Could you do your analysis on Google Local? What if you got less technical - I know this is destroying the art of your technology but perhaps taking a step in the shallow end will lead you to the deep parts in due time.


3) Finding a way to sell to the companies themselves. This may be the toughest, but perhaps the most lucrative method. The biggest issue here will be establishing relationships with every player - the challenge is indeed huge. Here is how I think you can do it:

***Expand Consumer-facing widget as cost effectively as possible:
First, build functionality on the consumer facing widget to do a similar (perhaps less complex) analysis, but this time on GetSatisfaction as opposed to Amazon. My opinion is that GetSatisfaction is an ideal data source - they do a lot of tagging, sentiment association, and grouping/organization up front so you dont have to. Garret Dimon had an excellent blog post to this end, a few months back. GetSatisfaction tells me the most about what Customer Service / Tech Support will be like at a company, before I buy the product.
No need to do it by every product (although GetSatisfaction also organizes its topics by product!), just rank the brand vs. its competitors. So for example, if I am on the Amazon page, and your widget unhides with the standard analysis but additionally says 'Compare the Customer service experience at __[brand]___' and then clicking on it takes me to the GetSatisfaction page and the widget gives me some simple analysis about whether I will be left in the dark after clicking 'buy', then I might really like that. Similarly, on the GetSatisfaction page, you could link to Amazon reviews (search for similar GetSatisfaction issues on Amazon review pages, vice versa?).
Target first companies that have a hardware and software element - ie: cameras, mp3 players, printers/scanners, hard drives, gaming peripherals, VOIP headsets, PDAs, etc. You want products that have a lot of different factors that go into the buying decision (hardware, software, cust service, etc.)
Start simple, but have a consumer facing widget that gives you a snapshot of the overall 'buyer experience' - what the product is like (Amazon) and what support is like (GetSatisfaction). THEN:
***Build out reports to sell to businesses to help them analyze/manage what their customers see on your widget:
Create an even more complex and detailed statistical breakdown, that may be too much information for consumers, but not for the businesses they describe. Using this tool, come up with a surprising fact about a company you want to sell your analysis to. Go to that company and divulge the fact, show them that your service gives their customer more advanced analysis than they have internally, and tell them you can in turn give them EVEN DEEPER analysis. Give them rankings of feedback items by importance, and demonstrate these items' contribution to an overall ranking, so they can manage/respond to problems and improve their ranking.
Tell them you'll give them a deep dive into what their customers are saying, and that that message can be useful in SO many ways. Marketing, Customer Service, Tech Support, Design, Sales, Supply Chain, Management oversight of the employee-->customer message, etc.
And do them one better. Tell them youll give them the same breakdown for their competitors.
Tell them you will also, if so desired, run cu$tom analy$i$ on private data that wont get to their competitors, such as: proprietary systems, email, blogger reviews, focus groups, surveys, beta tests, whatever).
***Market your product by holding companies hostage:
Tell them their customers will already have access to this info (at least using the widget on Amazon and GetSatisfaction), and their competitors may or may not be using your service.
Tell them that their internal analysis isnt apples to apples in context with their competitors like yours is.
Tell them that if they aren't on GetSatisfaction, then their customers are all alone there. Just like GetSatsfaction is essentially blackmailing companies to 'join the conversation', you are doing the same to get companies to pay you to run analysis on what is being said.
***Monetize by offering companies a few standard options or offer to design custom analysis:
When you have them interested, charge them on a one off basis for each statistical run. Offer a few packages, (give 'Company A' examples of what you can tell them about their own company/products, Competitor Analysis Packages, Custom run ideas, etc).
Pass some of the costs of building out a new analysis to the company, and then tell them they can run it at a discount after you initially set it up. Helps you fund the buildout of new analysis

It remains to be seen what kind of price point you would need to make money, what is the actual size of a market for this service, how hard of a sell it will be to a company, etc. But this suggestion is intended to add the most value with the least amount of new work. I look forward to seeing where you guys go with Pluribo. It is a fantastic technology!

Open Letter to iminlikewithyou.com

OK iminlikewithyou.com, your website is absolutely awesome.

I loved your presentation at the October 2008 NY Tech Meetup. You are really on to something. The most important part is obviously picking the right bets for games. I know that not every game is a winner, but I will tell you two that are guaranteed:

(1) A simple version of the longtime hit Subspace Continuum, which has been an MMO since way before it was cool. And by cool I mean popular:



(2) At the meetup, you showed a 1st person driving game demo that was in the works. Don’t forget to add guns/mines/turbo, etc. Also the ability to upgrade your car would be fantastic. These dynamics make simple games so addictive. Growing up, all my favorite racing games had them – I spent untold hours playing the following games:

Super Off Road


Top Gear 3000


Rock n' Roll Racing

Open Letter to Twitter

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**Update (10/22/09):

Of course, this post was written over a year ago, before self promoters like celebrities, bands, restaurants, politicians etc got on Twitter, which opened the window for a lot of 'normal' people to derive value from what was often nothing more than a collection of marketing messages. What has happened is that this mechanism has cause Twitter to evovle into the massive, mainstream medium we know today. In my defense, it's hard to predict that everyone has a little desire for self promotion, and that the sum total of all of that would be well received. So while part of what I was saying was wrong - mostly what I was saying was right. That is, the really interesting part of all this has become the people who have been able to structure that data - whether the early movers like StockTwits, my own company buzzd, or now Google and Bing. And its getting pretty interesting!
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10/3/08

Historically I start this blog with a sentence about how much I like the company I have addressed my open letter to. But Twitter, you aren’t going to hear that from me. If my blog was about innovation for the sake of the tech community, then I might be able to say how much I like you. You are beloved by a community of early adopters who also happen to have career incentives for broadcasting their interactions with the world.

But don’t be fooled. I don’t like you, and neither do my friends. We aren’t tempted by the promise of self promotion, so to us, Twitter seems kinda useless. Your website isn’t slick. Your “social network” is diluted by Johnny Networker, follow/refollow politics, and username aliases. You provide attention seekers with an excuse to get their name out with less effort and less substance. If I wanted to communicate among friends, there are many better (private) forums. If not solely to build a name in an industry, then why microblog? I am trying to call upon a criticism that others have executed better – that Twitter Isnt For Normal People, so I wont expand any further. So if I have such beef with Twitter, what is the point of this 'open letter'? Is it an open letter to cease and desist? Is Twitter doomed?
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Twitter is NOT doomed. You do have something here, but its not obvious, and you don’t seem to be focused on it. So what is good about Twitter, for a guy like me?

At first glance, nothing (!). For the average person, there is far more value in communicating privately, and little to gain from communicating publicly. Better to give an example: I have this friend named Lucas. He loves football, and steak, and the Beastie Boys, and Terminator movies and …well lets just get general and say ‘popular things’. One of his favorite things to say is how much he ‘loves the mainstream’, which I in turn love him for. He is a great example of Joe internet user. He has TONS of friends, and he is my feasibility test for any new technology. Would Lucas use it? Does Twitter pass the Lucas test? Lets try it:

Does Lucas want to tweet about him listening to ‘Fight For Your Right to Party’ for the one thousandth time? Does he have an unfulfilled need to opine publicly that Terminator 2 is a good movie? Hell no! Anyone he is friends with already knows that he these things are awesome, agree they are awesome, so its just not worth talking about, particularly over the internet (nerd!). Lucas doesn’t want an avatar, or to set some kind of new internet meme, his persona is obvious to the real world. He has enough trouble remembering to call real friends on their birthdays (because he has lots and is cool). But Lucas is no Luddite – so he does matter, and you should care what he thinks. Turns out he spends a lot of his free time on the internet - on Facebook, various well known media content sites like Citysearch, Hulu, ESPN.com, and other popular online services such as Ticketmaster, SeamlessWeb, Pandora, etc. And he dabbles in quirky internet services like woot and iConcertCal and if he knew it existed, probably a Facebook birthday reminder app as long as they (1) get him straight to what he wants and (2) when he gets there, the thing he sees seems instantly useful. I assure you, that is a high barometer, but that’s really the beauty of the Lucas test. Lucas really doesn’t care how good your developers are or if you are funded or if Arrington linked to you. To figure out how Twitter can be useful to Lucas, we need to reconsider what Twitter really is.

***Twitter is an open-ended wiki for real people’s ideas and thoughts

So how do I demonstrate this idea? Say Lucas is looking to buy a new phone, and wants to compare the iPhone and Blackberry. I know this may be hard to swallow, but Lucas doesn’t exactly subscribe to RSS feeds for Engadget and Gizmodo. His first go-to is a Google search. But what if I told him that you can search on Twitter to see everyday people comparing the two phones. Or that people often post their fantasy football picks. He *might* find that information useful (though probably still wouldn’t think to look there). At least in this world, Twitter has theoretical utility to him, instead of being entirely NOT useful.

Now… getting him to contribute would be infinitely harder. But when I think about it, he does do this already. On ESPN.com, when they have a user poll, he votes. He shares his thoughts with the world for free because he appreciates the data it creates and he wants to understand the dataset it belongs to. So perhaps that sports poll data is valuable… In fact, there is a company that mines and analyzes and yes, even sells that data.

Here is my point. The primary purpose of publishing versus communicating privately is adding your thoughts to the great pool of human knowledge - sharing ideas, opinions and thoughts. By publicly storing interpersonal communication, you turn it into data. Think of Twitter as a sloppy, open-ended wiki of blurbs, habits, opinions, activities. So why doesn’t the average person appreciate this depository of information?

***You need to redefine what sharing on Twitter means to people

The way Twitter is used now, much of what is shared is not useful. This medium has been built around the needs of a very unique and small community of early adopters. Twitter is not just a place where I can tweet about my iPhone. It’s a place where thousands of people are tweeting about iPhones, which is a different thing entirely. To reach the mass market, two things need to happen:

(1) People need to learn what the medium is useful for (outside of self promotion) – aggregating information through public communication.
(2) People need easier ways to track the big picture on Twitter

Imagine if people wrote tweets knowing that they would be analyzed; if there were more ways to analyse, sort, organize, discover, compare, dissect, graph, measure, contextualize and understand this amalgamation of thoughts. The key to Twitter’s future is context and meaning. There is just too much data out there, and not enough synthesis of that data. I have made this point before (geeks: think Semantic Web/Web 3.0). Because why else publish?
__________________

All this in mind, how do you shape Twitter going forward? The site has enough problems just keeping up with its own traffic. I realize my head is in the clouds. But with no good business model, shouldn’t you at least be aiming in a cardinal direction (up!), no matter how far down the road? At this point, it is this blogger’s opinion that Twitter might do well to decrease focus on growing traffic and building its community of early adopters. Third parties like Summize have been quick to home in on what Twitter has been missing, and Twitter was wise to snatch up Summize. Summize was ‘Answer v1.0’ to the question ‘What is the point of Twitter’? Remember, my point is that communication alone is not the point of Twitter, because there are always better means for doing so (instant message, chat rooms, email, facebook status updates, or other means of communication through similarly entrenched and ‘traditional social networks’). Why else publish? So what is in store for ‘Answer v2.0’, and beyond?

I will give a good example. My very good friend Vinicius Vacanti was in line at Shake Shack, a famous burger joint in NYC with an infamous (long) line. Two guys behind him were talking about how they just don’t see the point in Twitter. How they would never use it. Then one of them interjected “The only useful thing I ever saw come out of Twitter, was some crazy guy who had graphed the Twitter posts describing the line here at Shake Shack to show the best time of day to go”. He was referring to Vinicius’ own post (!!!). Besides being serendipitous, this was something special. It was a couple of regular guys finding use in Twitter. The ‘data’ in the tweets got lost in the mosh pit of too much information. But because Vinicius did the work to analyze and graphically represent what was happening, it made it to lunch line conversation for these average Joes. Suddenly Twitter was useful. This idea is already being noticed, but nobody is very smart about it yet. Im sure people would love to see (and participate) in metrics about the election, the federal bailout debate, etc. Watching the tag #factcheck on Twitter during the Vice Presidential debates, it was interesting to see how quickly everyone jumped on VP candidate Joe Biden for (correctly) using the word ‘Bosniacs’, and then how the tide turned when everyone realized that it was a real word. Goes to show you that there is a lot of junk out there, but another good thing about publishing publicly is that it promotes accountability, which not ironically was the idea behind the #factcheck tag itself.
__________________

But what about growing the community? A lot of the discussion about Twitter revolves around the Rogers Adoption curve. It is true, if you are focused on growing Twitter today, then the most important challenge is bridging the ‘Adoption Gap’. But the current version of Twitter doesn’t make any money, and doesn’t seem likely to ever make any money in its current form. So why grow something that loses money? Focus on how it is that you will make money (suggestions to follow). Don’t focus on how many users you have. Who knows what cultural meme will help your technology jump that gap, and lead everyday people to want to contribute. What if Twitter becomes the next platform for American Idol voting? You will bridge the gap in your adoption curve faster than you can blink, and you will be wishing you had spent more time thinking about what your product means rather than trying to build your (fickle) community of users. As long as you focus on your differentiator, (in this case the public data) then you are aiming to monetize on a mission statement instead of a social fad.

So how do you monetize? Make sense of the data you are creating, and make people pay you for it. To get any traction, you will certainly need to make a few changes to the product. Some ideas:

A ‘smart box’ on the sidebar that, similar to Gmail advertisements, provides feedback on the things you write about. Example: I tweet ‘Bush[thumbs down]’ – and in the box I see a chronological graph of people ranking the word Bush, or the box tells me “people who agree with you also said ___”, or the box tells me “number of times ‘Bush’ has been tweeted in the last 24 hours”, or the box provides a “ranked list of the top people tweeting the word ‘Bush’”, etc. Think stock traders using Twitter. Think instant rewards for sharing your opinion.

Guest accounts/anonymous tweets: You want as much contribution as possible, with as little startup cost. Get Joe Internet to contribute. Guest tweets would have to go through a spam filter first, perhaps.

The ability to Flag objectionable tweets: registered users should be able to provide anonymous feedback (red flag) to both Twitter the service and the person is misusing the right to tweet. When a tweet is flagged, other users can see that it has been marked as such, and it is removed from the data. Misuse of flagging can result in the termination of your username and removal of your flags.

Value Tags to help quantify/qualify data: add to your existing tags (@, #) a Thumbs up/down (+/-) which you attach to a word or phrase that can assign it a binary value.

Geotagging tweets to attribute a geographic value to the data that is being collected.

Ability to submit anonymous demographic information to enhance the data being created (optional, create incentive for doing this)

Semantic understanding of free-form text. This is OBVIOUSLY very difficult, but it would be really cool if a computer could begin to aggregate, classify and interpret opinions, and create discrete data. Twitter data would become one of the best single sources of information on the internet.
__________________

The goal being that eventually you could send anonymous, smart statistics to marketers, the media, hedge funds, whoever wants data about what people think. Make the business model this: analysis, and underneath: Powered by Twitter Analytics

The key point I hope to have made is that the only differentiator for Twitter is that the service makes it easy to share one’s thoughts with the world. The only (financial) value in being able to do so is that people will pay to know and measure what those thoughts are. In its current form, Twitter only helps you understand tweets on an individual basis. In aggregate, tweets will tell a much more meaningful story.