I find this rather interesting. Twitter has had trouble building a revenue model. Apparently, in accordance with the mantra that 'data is an asset', Twitter is selling old tweets for analysis (and then for marketing purposes). The twitter stream of the last few years is one of humanity's more interesting data/content creations as it captures ideas, resources, sentiments, and more. a library in 140 characters :)
The opportunity that IBM is chasing-analytics that power everything-is much bigger than the Internet boom of the last decade. "This will be the largest business opportunity IBM has ever had. It will dwarf ERP, back office, anything," Corgel said.