[gdp]

Genuinely good advice, but the prose wrapped around it is tedious and over-wrought. I think a lot of people will tl;dr this, so (spoiler alert!) the advice is basically to use Twitter to validate ideas by seeing if you get a follow-back rate of more than 10% from people in your target audience.

[mbenjaminsmith]

It's sort of an interesting story. I think it does a good job of setting the tone: guy makes enough money in a short enough amount of time to (he believes) warrant excessive drug use. The payoff is interesting though (the Twitter idea). Most articles about validating startup ideas give really vague guidelines for doing it yourself. This way adds more noise to Twitter but it's easily do-able by anyone with a little free time.

[MengYuanLong]

Vaguely interesting but completely unrelated. I expected "the secret" to be that this guy dressed in drag and talked up guys at the bar to spill their secrets. Needless to say, I was very disappointed when the "secret" was using Twitter as a testing ground.