The things people say on Twitter or share on Facebook are pretty trivial individually.

When you collect the 5 billion or so items posted to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks every day into one massive database, those bits of individual drivel combine into a massive pointillist masterpiece that is already changing the way governments and corporations relate to individual humans, allowing marketers to tailor products more precisely to the customer preferences (and target spam campaigns more effectively) with up to the minute insight into the thinking of their constituents.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

…