Twitter as an opinion validation tool

I was reading and interesting article on Harvard Business Review and it pointed out some of the interesting ways to look at information in the context of relevance to a certain topic and the relationship between ideas.

I know that it's a stretch to connect something communicated in 160-bytes-or-less to metaphor (let alone an idea). That being said, this system [the messages twitter'd, not the mechanism itself] has inherent meaning in aggregate... that also might be a stretch. Let's say that 100,000 people twitter that "Virtualization is great"; does that make it great? What is the nature of it's "greatness"? Knowing that Twitter is a self-regulated system based on a primarily one-way and unsolicited idea exchange (all vendor marketing influence aside) that is is really an opinion engine. I'd equate this to sites like ePinions or the pre-internet Consumer Reports. These were trusted authorities in terms of product quality, and based on their purchasing influence I'd say that this is roughly equivalent to "greatness".

In a day where we "democratize" things like software development with open-source models, why is the democratizing of opinions any less valid? This is certainly not a new idea, but ascertaining the alignment of any trends (or a majority of opinion ultimately nearing a "truth") from this raw data is still an immature area... or so I thought. After taking a look at some of these data visualization tools I see the potential for further leveraging this type of analysis to find patterns in the noise. The important patterns could be the opinions that matter... so if you could ascertain that 100,000 of your peers thoughts that brand X of virtualization was superior to brand Y, would you trust that opinion over proprietary evaluations? If I trusted the data and the process for evaluation, I'd trust the results.

Here's an interesting mashup of "vsphere" and "hyper-v":