So it's not really using Twitter...
... as anything other than a publicly-observable source of common random numbers? Huh, there are a million ways of doing this sort of trick. Check a stock feed and get the third letter of the day's highest riser. Download the front page of a news website and look at the fourth letter of the third word in the second paragraph of the first story. Number of posts to alt.test that day? Hell, check the temperature in LA or the humidity in Moscow on a weather site.... the possibilities are endless. Twitter just makes a badger-tastic hook to hang the story on.