So, you can pay Twitter for access, and people do just that. We pay quite a chunk of a money for a significant percentage of the global stream of Tweets, and we use that to do analytics and sell those analytics to customers.

Now, we also pull data from thousands of other providers, so it's not like we have all of our eggs in one basket, but we have a great business going where twitter is a significant percentage of the total volume of our data. Twitter also has certain advantages as a data source that many other providers don't.

Top of the list would be low-cost filtered API access. Much cheaper than the firehose, with commensurately less data (by keyword(s), location, etc. instead of the whole shebang.) The current pricing opacity and inability to just sign up online like you can with Parse (https://parse.com/plans) means far fewer people as customers. My understanding is that API deals are company-by-company.

A list of general suggestions for them: https://medium.com/@sthware/suggestions-for-twitter-hellowor...

Edit: I'll add that if relations get repaired now and then broken again, I don’t think they’ll be fixable a third time. They need to get this right, IMO.

Twitter has insight into what everyone on the planet is thinking RIGHT NOW, and they're using it to sell ads for t-shirts.

That's just a fundamental lack of imagination.

There's all kinds of things that can be built on that, if you can rely on the platform to remain available to you.

I've been hearing this -- "Twitter is just not inventive enough, they know what everyone is doing in the world" and so on.

Yet billions of dollars later and nobody there realised it? I can't imagine people there are so stupid and that they'd come read HN, smack they hand on their heads and say "Oh, we never knew, thanks HN commenters for saving us. We'll make a great profit and share it with you!".

But not to miss out, and join HN armchair analysts group, I for one, don't believe Twitter is that useful or valuable. Does it know what my neighbors are thinking? My boss? My grandma? Me? No, because I am not on Twitter, they are not.

I see a lot of garbage on Twitter usually. Silly status lines "mmm, yummy green salad!" or "what is the meaning of life..". Developers would do something like "Compiling takes too long, we need a new compiler!". And so on. Then of course it is the quintessential platform for spats and misunderstandings. It is hard to express ideas in 140 character lines so everything feels short, mean and snippy and people get into lengthy back and forths that are mostly stupid and pointless.

Is it impossible to monitise what they do? No, but I think it is not as clear-cut as it may seem.

I think it depends on who you are following... I don't check or even try to keep up with twitter.. I tend to check recents a few times a week.. but every time I see at least something interesting... most of my follows are in tech though.. yeah, there's a lot of random stuff... but there's some gems in there too.

I'm actually more inclined to tweet when I find something interesting... partly because looking at my own history works better than browser bookmarks at this point.. and partly because someone else might also find it interesting.

Actually Twitter makes a lot of money. They just burn much more than they make. Iwonder is the cost of their ooperations can be slashed 2x without almost nohe of the users noticing.

I wonder at this as well, if twitter's has a lot of waste and a lot of revenue, there is a straightforward way to make money.