I hear you, but I'm not so sure that it's just about picking people to follow. That feels too yesterday... I'd like to pull trends out of the conversations at

I hear you, but I'm not so sure that it's just about picking people to follow. That feels too yesterday... I'd like to pull trends out of the conversations at large. Can Twitter be a trending engine? Can you leverage a topic for financial gain? Is there actionable data in the random blatherings of a million people? If I am JetBlue (I'm not) and people are ranting or raving about some experience on Delta, can I use that data? Run a promo? Give them a safe haven? In one respect, Twitter seems like it can be the exposing of the raw conscious of "the public", that group that has been so elusive to marketeers. The trick is to extract the data, to measure the thing, without affecting that which you are measuring. One of the longest standing challenges in science. I'm rambling, but thinking on iterations of this in my head.