[virtualwhys]

Huh? Tweet data is not free for public use (well, less than 1% is), although the public provides the very data that they are monetizing.

We have a client who's willing to pay $10K/month for real-time tweet data pertaining to 20 search terms in the pharmaceutical industry, which is a small-time job for Gnip and Datasift. Check their pricing and tell me if you think Twitter is giving this data away for free. More likely they're taking a decent piece of the pie in exchange for access to the data.

Social media data is crucial for companies to stay on top of current (and past) trends -- Twitter knows this, and are profiting, presumably hugely as they have the market cornered with deep pocket clients willing to pay, repeatedly, month after month.