> However, if you try to use it to get news or updates on anything it is the least efficient, most stressful thing I've ever used.

Depends heavily on the set of people you follow. I've found it to be a great source of news, and I typically see news show up there hours to days before I see it show up in places like HN.

For instance, if you follow sports, it's an extremely efficient and direct way of keeping up-to-date with teams and players.

Twitter is the most awesome, amazing source of news and updates I've found. For example because I follow Tavis Ormandy on Twitter I know that a vulnerability related to bittorrent will soon be released by Google's Project Zero.

That said, it took months to get my feed to where it is today. It's not easy for each person to find the mix of accounts that is best for them. My recommendation is, be fast to follow folks who look interesting, and fast to unfollow folks if they are boring or you don't like them. When you find folks you like, see who they retweet, reply to, follow, etc. and follow all those folks to see what you think.

are there services out there which curate the channels available to insure quality and content? Say if I wanted to follow a particular sport or team, are there services which can set it up? Same goes for any subject

That would be very subjective. But probably exists. I am a heavy user of Twitter's List feature, and have columns in Tweetdeck for friends, local, sports, politics, colleagues etc. And try to curate these for my interest as best as possible, ie weed out too noisy tweeters etc.

I guess you can find other people's lists and follow them? E.g. a sports journalist's sports lists etc. I have not tried to do that so not sure if there are hurdles to overcome. And maybe someone can aggregate these public lists for others to find/follow?

> Say if I wanted to follow a particular sport or team, are there services which can set it up?

It's called ESPN.

ESPN only really cover one country. If you're in the US I'm sure it's fine but for everyone else the coverage is not only almost nonexistent but often factually wrong when it does exist. I saw AFL coverage on ESPN where they did not understand the distinction between goals and points and left the wrong scores up for ages.

I use it to follow a relatively small (a few dozen) group of mostly computer scientists with a few cooks/chefs and basketball writers. At this level it takes maybe 1-2 minutes to read an entire day's feed, and I usually end up with a few interesting things to read that I might not have seen otherwise. I have also found it useful at conferences to follow what's happening.

I have no idea how people follow more than say a hundred people profitably.

Yes, no idea.

What I find awful is that HN and Reddit save me time by sorting out low-quality content, while on Twitter you're the one that has to work hard to do it (if you can), and Twitter itself just adds more noise in the meantime.

I use it to follow artists, local media personalities, local journos, etc. to get live information from them.

This is particularly relevant for hyper-local media which basically has zero media footprint outside of dead-tree newspapers and talk radio.

Basically: follow your city councilor on Twitter. Start from there.

The only reason I use twitter is because it's where the forum culture of the 2000s has migrated. All the good SA posters pretty much only use twitter now, so it's the only place for that sort of content.

What's "SA"?

SomethingAwful - the accounts they meant are probably guys like @arr, @livestock, @dogboner, @sexyfacts4u, @dril

Yup, thanks.

I use it mainly to keep up with streamers and fellow artists, along with a good amount of news from various aggregators. I also have interesting conversations on there occasionally.

Twitter is what you make it. I'm sincerely worried their VC backed top heavy company is going to topple over and carry with it to oblivion a service that could probably run on 1/20th of it's infrastructure.

For sports, it's the fastest way to get news - if you follow the right people.

I was using it to get notified every time my favorite columnist put up something new. Unfortunately, the publisher started requiring registration to read stuff.

But I see it as a way to keep track of what a columnist, journalist, or public figure is doing.

Twitter is quite excellent for some communities. For Javascript and politics, for example (and also javascript politics), Twitter has become the place where the news actually happens, instead of just being disseminated.