Thanks for the comment. You are correct – there are a lot of Google searches that are not monetizable, particularly those that are navigational in nature. I agree that attention data is the raw material of most media businesses. To your point, though, part of why attention data is the raw material of media businesses is because those who can either deliver audiences or measure audiences are in a good position to extract value. Right now, most of the “audience data” that Twitter has is available to anyone who's smart enough to use Summize and set up some custom queries. Any savvy social media marketer ought to be able to do that.

Tracking what's being consumed, shared, and re-tweeted on Twitter is also valuable for content producers, but that sounds a lot more like a traditional media monitoring and analytics business than a web community, social network, or utilitiy.

Yes, I agree that Twitter does a much better job of capturing what's happening right now than Google does. Twitter + Summize + alerts is basically like Google Alerts on steroids for those who need to know something right when it happens as opposed to waiting for it to hit the web or some other media outlet. Real-time info is useful, but it's most useful to those for whom waiting until the story breaks elsewhere is costly.

Taking your Microsoft Windows 7 example, what would Microsoft have done if they knew that 1,000 people on Twitter were saying mean things about Windows 7? And would that be any more or less important than 1,000 blog comments, Facebook status updates, or other expressions of dislike voiced in another forum?

For early warning systems to be really valuable, the thing that they're warning you about has to be actionable / interesting AND the recipient of the warning needs to be in a position to do something with the warning. Twitter could be that system at scale, but I'd argue they're not there yet and the business model around being that system is still a bit unclear to me.