I'm less convinced of its actual value. The Twitter-based papers I've read seem to all have two things in common: First, they all use Twitter data. Second, they all seem to desperately want to present observations about how people interact on Twitter as being universal, even though nobody seems to be able to come up with a theoretical or empirical reason why that should be the case that's more compelling than, "We we have to pretend it is in order to get published."
They often report about how some group of people on Twitter are angry about something -- as if that matters. Reddit has almost as many monthly active users lately, yet no journalist makes the mistake of reporting on Reddit comments as if it's generalizable to the larger population.
This isn't new. When I was an analyst, some reporters would call me for a quote about something. There were times when I didn't have anything to say because I didn't know anything about said thing. But some would pester me for a quote anyway so they didn't have to give someone else a call.
Twitter does seem to have become a particular crutch though.
You should stop by /r/austin sometime, and just lurk. The amount of local reporters looking for some kind of pulse to put their finger on and even those nu-'journalist' sites (Vice,Vox,insert here) obviously mining for quotebait is absurd, and the community has been calling it out.
Of course, /r/austin isn't a remarkably interesting place to be anyway for a lot of reasons...it's just interesting to watch the "Austin" phenomenon manifested there. Different story though.
quality news sources, like NPR
I say this as someone who really wants to like NPR and struggles to find any unbiased news source.
Twitter currently has lists, but the problem is that these lists aren't crowdsourced (to my knowledge). They're maintained by individuals, which is unsustainable, because one person can only do so much work keeping a list accurate and up-to-date.
This describes virtually every announcement I've heard from twitter.
I'm not claiming that such a model is guaranteed to be perfect or even as good as a pollster, but it sounds in principle like a reasonable thing to do, if you take appropriate precautions to reduce bias.
Now given the Twitters nature then is there such a model that is even approximately accurate?
Or in other words, what relevant data Twitters collects and how accurate it is?
For that kind of thing, having lots of users is the key feature of interest.
Why should we care about this project? If you want to use this to find power outages using Twitter, why not just do that directly with e.g. grep (also, more importantly, are these outages about which the utility company doesn't already know?). Having big data (related: 12 Million lines of text isn't big) isn't cool in and of itself. Doing things which help with that data would be cool.
Does that actually mean it's valuable? Just because something's one of a kind doesn't mean it's worth that much.
GP is basically saying twitter has accumulated a vast wealth of social data that is immensely valuable to the research community.
Journalists certainly are. Getting quotes was hard work. Now it consists of trawling Twitter. Not sure if this has been a boon or bane for journalism, however.
In the short term, anyway. The substitution of Twitter-trawling for actual journalism and research is doing immense damage in the long run.
twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it, it would need to basically just randomly show up on your instant messenger unbidden, it has no universal connector like radio and tv which are everywhere.
then the last issue is there are too many voices on twitter so only those connected get out and assume importance. importance to only users of the medium
I'm not so sure. Hashtags are everwhere both physical and digital, companies want to to start tweeting about their event/product/etc. As for a direct connection, how often have you see a tweet embedded in a news article, or displayed on live TV?
Seems like a pretty huge change and it's definitely tough to envision!