Hacker News Reader

I can understand MS but John Deere? Hard to credit that they'd be monitoring HN. I mean how many farmers read HN?

John deer is willing to spend millions to protect their IP, all the way to the color green.

They're pretty good at it then

I'm sceptical as well but I imagine people there search Twitter and Google and such to see what is being said by them.

I didn't think of that!

There are services that have the specific purpose of identifying discussions about brands in real time [1].

Whether that's good or bad depends on how it's used I guess.