Can Twitter make you money? The rich think so...

I watched this short one minute report on CNN today, with interest. I sometimes cringe at what I'm going to see and hear reported when a journalist reports about making money online, but it's not what I thought it would be. It's about a hedge fund group that's created some software that analyzes tweets to help make predictions about the financial markets, and it's shockingly accurate.

See the video here (not sure if you can see it outside of USA)

CNN.com International - Breaking, World, Business, Sports, Entertainment and Video News

My thoughts:

Twitter is one of those big sites funded by venture capitalists, largely, and has never really been a huge money maker yet, from my understanding. I mean, Twitter does not make much money even they are so huge. They have not fully monetized, or perhaps just not as much as others would have. Maybe they're making enough, now, I don't know. I think there are "featured tweets" or something that you can pay Twitter for, but is that it? Somebody else who knows Twitter better can correct me on this, if I'm wrong.

Anyway, about a hedge fund using twitter to help correlate people's moods to the market, it's amazing that it works 88% of the time! Pretty freaking awesome, if you ask me. It reminds me of the project some group demoed this year about sniffing out fake reviews on consumer websites that also worked amazingly well.

The point is, Twitter is a place with real people and a place where people socialize. Use it as such. Be real on Twitter, if tweeting is what floats your boat. But obviously, you can use it as a great way to do research on trends, etc. as this hedge fund is doing, although you'd be doing it on a major scale.

Another lesson to take from this is that if you can innovate and come up with new, smart ways to use existing resources, you will be right on the cutting edge. Pretty amazing what they've done with their software, here.

Also, how about being the guy who coded the software? You'd charge millions for that!

So many lessons and insights you can take from this, wonder if anyone else has any they'd like to share?