Where people got the idea that they have a right to consume the work of others without paying for it is beyond me.

Full disclosure, I produce content, and strangely, I expect to get paid to do this.

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And, good on them. On the surface, there's an elegiac tone to the whole venture, but here's hoping something good comes of it.

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When you go to Google, you're thinking about the future: I am going to buy a snowblower and want to find information about it. It's easy to target ads at an intention of future action, as you can more easily profit from the result.

With Twitter, you're looking for reactions or information about something that's happening in the present- what do people think about this awards ceremony? Once you've read the tweets, that transaction is over- targeting you for awards ceremony related merchandise is unlikely to pay back.

I think Twitter is going to be more useful as an early warning radar for emerging trends- and that means looking at the data as an aggregate and acting upon that broadly, rather than targeting individual users for actions based on their inputs or searches.

Question is, does Twitter have the patience or the long view to become the Lexis-Nexis of the Zeitgeist?

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