Distant echoes of "ch-ching" for Twitter?

I picked up an interesting link today from a post by @CMEGroup on Twitter, which was a blog post about the potential for algorithmic trading based on Twitter feeds.

The blogger highlights a new technology from StreamBase, who have developed a Twitter interface for their CEP engine, or in layman's language, their blackbox trading technology. Basically, they have built applications that look at real time events, analyse their impact and decide whether to act - eg decide whether to trade based on that event/information.

Their release sums it up best:
Mark Palmer, CEO of StreamBase (@mrkwpalmer). “We’re seeing business applications that ingest Twitter message content, frequency, patterns, hashtag use, and so on, and then transmit Twitter messages. For example, trading systems or operations support can use Twitter direct messaging to alert users of trading opportunities or system problems. Systems can also use Twitter messages to assess economic sentiment in real-time for trading systems, or marketing analytics, through monitoring news headlines and popular sentiment transmitted via Twitter. And we’ve even seen interest from the government and security industries for in-bound Twitter message processing.”

The most interesting point for me is how this shows that there is real business use for the "fuzzy" facts that Twitter offers. In one of the response posts, the blogger states:
"Streambase's ability to use Twitter as a source of "fuzzy" information would increase my edge on the rest of the market."

This is the key point for me - as he makes clear, trading is not an exact science, and traders use every source of material possible to spot trends, and make their trading decisions before that trend breaks. For example, the Iran election news that broke on Twitter could have impacted FX trading. In a more local example, the recent #etisalatfail stories about the Blackberry patch should impact Etisalat's business, if it weren't part of one of the most ridiculous duopolies ever dreamed up.

What this also underlines though, is the fact that Twitter appeals most to those in the news, media, and tech industries. These are the people that see the value and are out there busily forming communities and creating conversations, and it could be the case that the stellar rates of growth slow once those industries are online and Tweeting away. Yes, there are lots of people in those industries. Yes, there are celebrities and their followers (though I think this phenomenon has a shelf-life, personally). But when positioned against the likes of Facebook, which is designed to appeal to everyone with some semblance of a family or social life, I'm not sure that Twitter has the same ubiquitous appeal.

So, the trading industry has seen a potential business opportunity in Twitter, and is now busily making it work for them as a media alert service and trend spotting tool. It seems to me that this is where Twitter needs to start to get smart and actively start searching for ways to license fat feeds to companies such as StreamBase, answering the interminable question - how can Twitter make money? If I hear the echoes of "ch-ching" from over here in the sandpit, they should be deafening over there at T-HQ!