The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web | Hacker News Reader

The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web

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36 pointssant0sk118 comments

Facebook already possesses and uses this sort of personal information for ads and they still don't have a great monetization rate per user. Twitter certainly has less overhead per user though.

Exactly. This is the same tired argument that we've been hearing about the FB's and MySpaces forever. Logically, it makes perfect sense. In reality, nobody has figured out how to actually monetize this sort of activity yet.

Actually, it seems like the argument is subtly different. Instead of trying to guess what we're looking for, this would try to answer what we've explicitly asked about. It's like the difference between your friends randomly telling you what car you should buy and them answering in response to your question about what car you should buy.

I think Google knows more about us than Twitter does.

I think Google knows more about Twitter than Twitter does.

I think we know more about Google than Twitter does.

If that's the case Twitter should ask Google what its business model will be.

More often than not I think we worry to much about profitability and social-acceptability while building applications for the web. As of Web2.0 we're suddenly deluded with social apps that only harness user's in terms of output, meaning applications that allow users to socialize with one another via the apps API; IMHO, this just creates more noise. We need web apps that harness users/user input for creating better output. This sort of thing can be built directly into existing APIs or built from scratch where the user is directly passing vast amounts of data as input. Current web-apps are weak in this regard, since the input we ever pass into the system are either shouts or bookmarks.

the semantic web is more like the gold at the end of the rainbow

I don't know about that. If the end user actually got to the end of the rainbow, they would have a pot of gold. I think most end users would love to have a pot of gold.

If the end user actually got to the end of the semantic web... they'd have some extra invisible markup. I do not think I would be able to convince most end users "Hey, I was going to give you a pot of gold but instead have some extra invisible markup. You should be happy, you're getting a much better deal now."

Didn't get the "semantic web" part - isn't what the article describes simply keyword-sensitive ads?

good insight, but twitter has lots of noise (people doing things) vs the signal the blogger is referring to (people looking to solve a problem or people shopping for things)

If Twitter started profiling me and providing targeted ads based on what I say, I wonder if I would begin to provide fewer and fewer useful nouns in my messages over time.

something like: oh man, we had such a great time at that place. remember when he did that thing.

http://be-a-magpie.com/ are already using the information in my tweets to post ads based on my content.

There is a community wide negativity towards serving ads to your followers. With Twitter still unable to come up with a definitive financial model (pay per tweet / tweet advertising / monthly subscription etc) then companies like this will continue to pop up until they lay down a marker.

It's this sorta paranoia that prevents me from signing up for a Facebook account.

Oh the horror! Advertisers knowing what I like, dislike and want to purchase. The humanity!

Look I'm about as tin-foil hatted as they come but isn't this what we'd prefer instead of carpet bombing us with ads for shit we'd never buy?

I don't trust anyone who spells perusal "parusel".

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