Twitter may have saved me ~$100 today. I poster, er… tweeted about how bad my MacBook Pro’s battery is getting, and an old friend who used to work for Apple told me that I can probably get it replaced for free since I’m still under AppleCare. This was contrary to the research I had already conducted, and I wouldn’t have thought to ask him directly (heck, I wouldn’t have thought to ask anyone—I had already done my research). So, it can provide a sort of “tapping the collective” thing, just like Fluther aims to do. Except in Twitter’s case, it just happened. I didn’t even try, and it saved me a ton of money.
So, in short, you can sometimes learn things from people when you wouldn’t have even thought to ask a question in the first place. Twitter facilitates that.