The phrase "x is unparalleled" implies uniqueness by virtue of the value it provides.

GP is basically saying twitter has accumulated a vast wealth of social data that is immensely valuable to the research community.

Sounds like the academic community should be charged for access to the data, if there is so much value in there.

The media is clearly benefiting, with many stories backed by a Donald Trump tweet. But if the tweets weren't free to begin with, they might not be as newsworthy.

> the media is clearly benefiting

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.

> Journalists certainly are

In the short term, anyway. The substitution of Twitter-trawling for actual journalism and research is doing immense damage in the long run.

For full access to the twitter archive, they are, though a lot of data can be gleaned from what's publicly posted.

In retrospect I should have assumed that to be the case

I think you (and many others) have this relationship by the wrong end. Things which are valuable are frequently rare/unique, whereas there are many unique/rare things with no value whatsoever. As others in this thread have implied, the lack of ability to monetize is strongly correlated with a lack of real value.

that is my concern as well, if it truly was so widespread and useful I doubt they could turn a profit, however its real market is apparently much smaller than people suspect.

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

> twitter simply cannot reach people who don't go looking for it

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?

Hashtags are everywhere, but it doesn't follow that Twitter is - see FB, Insta, even LinkedIn.

It means it is easy to access. That is all.