Twitter's utility

Twitter is a messaging service, limited to 160 140 characters, accessed on mobile phones and the web, and whose raison d'etre is "What are you doing?" I began as an unbeliever, and if not now a believer, I have become a regular user.

Dan Farber of CNet has a good take on its relative usefulness.

I first learned of the recent tragic earthquake in China via Twitter messages from people I follow on the service. To be clear, Twitter is not the Holy Grail of communications services--it's an extension of instant messaging and technologies such as RSS. Nor are the 140 characters in a Twitter message a substitute for a blog post or news article. But a "tweet" can be a network amplifier, providing a brief snapshot [emphasis mine], innervated by followers and the followed, that can be broadcast around the world in near real time.

Twitter and related services are currently noisy, spammy, unwieldy, overrated and often unreliable. But over time, the core concepts will become an integral part of the Internet's communications fabric.

Here's how I use Twitter.

• It's a useful business tool. I alert customers to brewery and beer-related events in which I'm participating. And quick beer business updates.
• Succinct beer reviews, particularly at beer tastings or festivals.
• I link the Tweets —as the updates are called— to my blog, website, and FaceBook account.
• Public access to tweets can be controlled. Mine are public, but I limit their personal content.

Here's an example of an established medium using the service to report news: Covering the news with Twitter

But Twitter does not seem ready now to be a replacement tool for the mobile phone, text messaging, or Instant Messaging. There have been all too frequent crashes of the system, incidents of which have seemed to have been increasing as the service's popularity has risen. For example, Twitter is at reduced functioning today.

More about Twitter at Twitter.