Absurd. I love how he randomly throws out a ridiculous number, $5-10 billion, but never breaks down the justification numerically.

Who is this guy, and why do we keep listening to him? Really? Who the hell is he?

He's famous for being famous which, if you think about it, means he is a perfect match for Twitter.

In more ways than one.

I use Twitter for all sorts of stuff. It's been awesome for me. I filled up a cryptography class I wanted to give, I ran 2 different surveys, I crowdsourced the content for a poster, I've started innumerable conversations on things, I've directed people to blog posts I wanted to highlight, and I've got 3 months of marketing plans that all hinge on getting the word out over Twitter.

Twitter is useful.

Now, can someone explain how Scoble is useful? Because again I don't know why the hell we've ever listened to him.

I'm curious, do you know about http://identi.ca ? If so, why would you consider Twitter to be more advantageous?

Nope. Don't know anything about it. I use Twitter because my Twitter network is large enough to do cool things with.

Because more people use it, it's simpler, and it's prettier. identi.ca serves a very niche audience.

I think he is somebody who bothers to write.

Well, now that FriendFeed is a lame duck he has to have something to rave about. This is textbook Scoble. How he ever became "a thought leader" is beyond me.

"The experiences I'm having with business owners in every city makes me understand some things:

....

2. Twitter is underhyped. I'm now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.

....

Anyway, this all leads me to understand that Twitter is way underhyped and is worth more in the marketplace than anyone has estimated yet."

So the author "understands" that Twitter is underhyped because, citing item number 2, "Twitter is underhyped." What kind of silly argumentation is this?

yeah, I think that what the world really needs is more hype about twitter...

I think a lot of his points are somewhat true, but he is a bad judge of degree, and a worse judge of valuation. I'd bet money that if they raised another round it would be valued at far less than $5B.

That kind of number is incompetant from a journalistic perspective because it will never be openly validated.

I fucking hate that pundits can bloviate without consequence to their reputation.

Beyond the hype, Twitter is significant because you can crawl their complete social network graph of millions of users. Delicious et al offers a similar crawling but they don't have the same user base, and facebook doesn't permit to do this.

Why it's important? from a business perspective you can quickly analyze the customer sector of companies: look at dell followers, compare it to the apple ones, what's the difference? (don't know if apple is on Twitter so take this as an example)

And this tells you what, exactly? How does knowing which social marketers, spam bots, and celebrities a nonrandom sampling of 50,000 technically inclined hipsters follow help me sell computers to them?

The deification of twitter continues.

He is Michael Arrington's best buddy, so its only fitting that he sensationalize things and pull numbers out of his ass.

There's no answer to the "why" in the article beyond celebrity mentions and saying that businesses will pay.

A valuation of $5 billion would mean about $200 per user at the 25 million users mark, which would be reasonable were it a porn-site with paying members. But it's not, it's Twitter.