Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway.
When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap
When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap