What twitter brings to the table, and does it better than anyone out there, is the ability to hear what people are talking about…in real time. Twitter search was going to be something dynamic and a game changer and this is what the company’s management team recognized when they acquired the search engine Summize and incorporated it into the platform. Twitter search is the pulse indicator on what the twitterati are talking about. Granted that a majority of the population is not on twitter but we can hypothesize that the mavens (early adopters), who are twittering their brains out, are indeed well connected to the pragmatists and the convervatives (those who wait for others to adopt before jumping in).

This presents an interesting use for twitter…as a listening device and if you know what to listen for, you can hear a lot

Take for instance….today the movie Watchmen comes out and twitter is predicting, based on the number of people who are talking about it, that it will do better than most Oscar winning movies that came out earlier in the year…yes, that includes Slumdog Millionaire. Using trendrr (a service about which I wrote in an earlier post), we can draw a chart on the number of times the word “Watchmen” is occurring on public tweets and go back about a week for comparison. I made one such graph…take a look.

This is powerful but there are some issues with this approach. What if the twitterati (people who tweet) are writing things like “watchmen sucked!”. I am sure my rudimentary search can be corrected to adjust for this one particular variation but the possibilities of negative usage are boundless and this is where the mathematicians and their fancy algorithms come in. Whether twitter was right or wrong about its prediction in saying that Watchmen will be a hit can be easily seen in 2-3 weeks but that’s not the point here.

The main thing of interest is that here’s yet another use of a service that seems to have taken everyone by storm. Still missing a viable business model though…but I am sure they are working on it