You can tell that Twitter has added something important to the ecosystem by the volume of the snickering. If you dismiss it by asking "Why do I care what you had for breakfast?", there are only two choices. First, you're saying everyone on Twitter is an idiot. Second, you don't understand what you're talking about. As a Twitterer (dweinberger), I'm going to go with Option #2.
Twitter's success tells us a lot...including the following 4.5 points:
1. Twitter in its native form assumes we're ok with not keeping up with the abundance. Tweets are going to scroll by when you're not looking, and you're never going to see them. Twitter assumes you will let them go, the way most of us cannot leave messages in our email inboxes unread (or undismissed).
2. Social asymmetry addresses the scaling problem. At Twitter, the people you follow are not necessarily the people who are following you. That's exactly not how mailing lists and weekly status meetings work, and Twitter's approach impedes the back-and-forth development of ideas. But, maybe that's not what Twitter is primarily about. And the asymmetry means that some people can have lots of followers but still participate as listeners.
2.5. (Maybe in an age of abundance, the back and forth development of ideas isn't the only process. Sure, having a small group kick around an idea often works. But maybe in some instances it also works for an idea to be lobbed like a beach ball from one group to another, each putting their own spin on it.)
3. Twitter is an app that scales as as platform. That is, it comes with a set of features that makes it usable and popular. But it's open enough to enable users and third parties to add capabilities that make it useful for what it wasn't designed for. For example, a convention has arisen among users that "RT" will stand for "re-tweet" when you want to publish someone else's tweet to one's own followers.
4. We'll complicate simple things as much as we have to. We'll invent "hashtags" (tags that begin with #, embedded within a tweet) to let people find tweets on a particular topic, getting past the "it already scrolled past" issue. We'll invent layers upon layers of aggregators of tweets. We'll just bang away on it as hard as we have to in order to accrete significance. We truly are meaning monkeys.
Loading comments… 
I think people, especially kids and young adults put WAY too much informatio
I highly recommend a book my brother gave me years ago – one that I initially dismissed as "the intuitivel
Human beings have such potential, but only if we choose to remain conscious. Please, just shut off your damn devices for a split second, and look someone else directly in the eyes?
Twitter is, in fact, a form of communicat
Twitter is not the end of communicat
Perhaps the message has less to do with who gets or doesn't get Twitter and more to do with the apparently increasing need for people to find communicat
That is all.
A couple of generation
People argue that "you don't HAVE to look at ALL the tweets". Yeah you do. That's how people work: we see informatio
a) blocking out more coherent, important and useful thoughts and
b) causing people to (perhaps unconsciou
Another side to this issue is that I'm a person who likes to respond to what I hear or see in the media, but now most media outlets are urging viewers/li
Can Twitter be an enormous time sink? Sure, anything can be an enormous time sink if you don't use it in a productive way. Most of these comments that people have about Twitter being useless, meaningles
That being said, I also know that just because something is lost on me doesn't make it irrelevant or invalid. Let it go where it will go. It's obviously found a place for a lot of people. Now only time will tell whether it has staying power.
- from the non Facebook / MySpace / blogging guy
If its for business purposes; its like when do you have time to create if you're always trying to get "friended" on Twitter. Give me a break. I'll do the cell phone, the email and even the blogging but Twitter is my deal breaker.