Twitter and track and the goldmine in business intelligence 

Keyword tracking of Twitter conversations is stale now that the track feature has been supressed. Live is better, and the Twitter guys know it well. They know a big part of their meal ticket (and their venture partners') will be to offer the fast realtime stream of observations about everything under the sun, including commercial products and services.

Consumer Web 2.0 properties normally go for a big user base first, then work out how to sell the users -- usually selling just their eyeballs, to advertisers. In Twitter's case its users have something much more valuable than just passive eyeballs and fingers that usually don't click on banner ads.

You can almost see the Twitter team sitting there, hugging themselves, clutching at their wonder feature, knowing they're onto something, but thinking "Oh shit, what do we do with this monster of a success? All we know is we're not looking at a traditional ad model. How do we sell this realtime market research? Better freeze it for now, not give it away, then figure it out." Twitter did buy Summize, one way to search the stream for keywords, so that's an indication they understand the value of the business intelligence gained by scanning the Twitterverse environment. It's now called Twitter Search, and it's very nearly an easter egg, not linked from the regular Twitter pages.

Let me give you a couple examples of situations when I asked questions of Twitter stream, to show you the power of tapping into this rich bundle of opinions and observations.

iTunes bottleneck. A few weeks ago when the new iPhone went on sale, existing iPhone owners also could get the new firmware, so that morning I tried to download it and iTunes locked up. I didn't bother with Google search, or the more timely Google blog search, knowing the Twitter crowd would tell me if it was just me. It wasn't. There were dozens of reports of the same problem I was having, and the answer to my question: nothing I could do about it, just go to work and try again that night.

Weezer outrage. Last night I noticed a Weezer song used in a Beaches resort commercial. I wondered if other fans were reacting in the same negative way I do when a song I like has been cashed out. They were. Check out the Twitter search compared with the blog search. No comparison. You'd have to spend 100 times longer on the blog search to open each post and see if it's relevant, while the Twitter results page tells you the answer in a glance, a few seconds.

I'll leave it to your own imagination to connect the dots and see how it might be to a company's advantage to use this resource, especially a consumer-facing company.

Search is valuable, but track, the lightning-quick realtime stream via IM and XMPP, is gold. Steve Gillmor has to be right; that has to be why Twitter has clammed up and blocked it off. I guess the only answer is to drill offshore, or threaten it.