It is more like a big political conference where I may pick up interesting nuggets here and there, or where I can use various tools (for a conference: programme, workshop titles, recommendations from the bloke in the bar, flyers etc: for Twitter, hashtags, keyword searches, following people who know their stuff, random conversations I happen to see etc) to find interesting comments.

A better explanation than I can do in a comment:

Twitter as 18C Coffeehouse:
http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2009/01/twitter-how-to-be-twit.html

And on the basics:
http://bishopalan.blogspot.com/2009/02/twitter-compleat-twit.html

Right, lunch.

M.

For me the joy of the piece was that it has wound up Dolly.

No twitter isn’t private which is why I take any stuff over to IM – but you can “direct message” a contact which IS private.

Its just another comms medium I use. One of many.

Twitter is useful to me to keep up to date and in touch “instantly” with a tight group of people ( i follow 20 or so people)

OK, I use IM as well, but twitter is like texting, and my contacts have pointed me to some useful info. Like “I need a web based OLAP client for postgreSQL – anybody?” got some good recommendations and started some conversations “offline”. Ok I could’ve googled but thats a bit scattergun.

my 2 cents.

My interest in it is mostly professional; as a web developer, its indisputable that a free, open-access, hyper-text communications platform can’t be ignored. The fact that it can only carry text and links, perversely, makes it *closer* to what the www platform was originally designed for.

Images, fonts, the blink tag (remember that?I still get flashbacks!) all were added much later. Its also, therefore, agreeably egalitarian as straight-out text to speech apps are ten-a-penny and ensure the visually impared can know *exactly* as much as anyone else.

So really its a platform, not merely a communicative mode. In that respect its interesting. Narcissistic diarrhea dribbling out of Dolly Draper, not so much!

I do not have a problem with Twitter monetizing the site. They have bills and employees to pay. I send out links to my sponsors in my tweets, not a lot in comparison to how many other tweets we send out.

If someone is providing something of value to someone else there is nothing wrong with earning an income from it. If person does not like ads, they can simply stop following me and in the case of Twitter, they can stop using it.

Twitter has many uses, people use it for different reasons as I stated before. It is up to the individual to decide how he wants to use it and for the other users to decide who they want to follow.

As far as being comparing Tweets to a Blog post, there is no comparison. Tweets as a “blog post” are just comments where as a blog post is a lecture in comparison.