(perhaps even some form “cookie” that both logged and synced with the data”), the site would pay you to twitter on what you ate for lunch, where you ate it, how much it cost, how you spent your money, where you were planning on going Saturday night, the path you walked to work, all sorts of relevant data that a “super-cruncher”, or data-miner would want.  People who wanted certain data sets or wished to perform certain studies could even post them and people could flock in.  Imagine if you could get a virtually real time statistical gauge on McDonald’s sales, or even measures of inflation, etc.   The data could be tremendously valuable and the amount people would get paid would be a function of the demand for the data they produce, their regularity of submission, and some statistical measure of its accuracy - used to weed out those people who randomly fill in “anything”.  With the general acceptance of SMS, PDA’s, GPS, Google Maps, and various mashups, the ability to do something like this would not be far fetched.  Some stats could be public and shared, other would be premium and only be accessed by those who paid for it.  You could also offer “premium” subscriptions where people could access the entire database and mine it how they see fit.  Integration into Facebook, iPhone, Amazon, Ebay, and other devices, web-apps, etc would foster its growth and usability.

There are a multitude of directions it could go into and I could write for hours, but I think just as Google’s value is in its search data, and algorithm, and it monetizes it through ads, Twitter’s value is in its collection of tweets, and it would be monetized through organizing it into a useful form.  Google takes its database, organizes it, and provides a superior ad product.  It then pays people to post its ads on websites, and gets paid based on how efficient it is at getting someone’s ad in front of the right person’s eyes.  Twitter could take its database of tweets, organize it, and pay people to Twitter and add to its database what the market determines as meaningful tweets, and then get paid on its ability to organize the database of tweets into a useful form of data that a company could use for consumer research, business intelligence, financial analysis, etc.   While there have been some attempts at mashups, and a site that seems to be going into this direction is Trendrr.  The convergence of microblogging and data-mining is inevitable.  Since Twitter’s market is and will be mostly filled with narcissists who wish to have their information displayed anyways, it shouldn’t be too hard to convert these liabilities on your database and infrastructure to revenue producing assets, while preserving most of the sanctity of what was originally intended to be created.

Google started by asking the question “What are you searching for?”. Its dramatic growth and profitability stemmed from its ability to take the answer and ask a more profitable question, “Would this site/product/service then appeal to you?” .  The quantity and quality of “Yes” answers to that question is the moneymaker for Google.  Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?”.  It must find a way to take that answer and ask a profitable question.  I think the most profitable one would be, “If I paid you X to tell me that from now on, could I share this data with third parties?”  I think the answer will be lucrative enough to leave those who own Twitter with Googley eyes.