The immediacy of the conversation on Twitter is a big reason why people like it. It feels much more personal. The limit in length means normal people can write as well as popular bloggers, and everyone is forced to edit their writing.

If only all bloggers/comments were as constrained.

The only use I've seen for Twitter is the ability to follow companies for status updates or important announcements. The local university here is looking to do this for students, and I've seen several online services use it for downtime/updates.

But an RSS feed does the same thing already, and is in a format that doesn't make me have to subscribe to yet another site. With feedburner, there's no worry about feed traffic getting out of hand either. So I don't really see the point, except maybe as a marketing tool to the Twitter crowd...

Then again, my startup uses it too (in addition to our blog/RSS), and my business partner really likes it. So maybe I'm just clueless :)

Just to clarify, I don't mean conversation is useless, but I see other sites enabling that in a better way already. As a conversation tool, Twitter seems more like a feature than a full service.

Its an amazing simple idea and tool!

So much data on there for us start-uppers to use for research, marketing, as well as building innovating services using the data. One could create a crowd sourced Rotten Tomatoes-esque site. One example of many what can be done with the data there!

Let me rephrase what I said. It's created a huge network, yes. I don't see any reason for me to use it. I think that limiting the messages is silly and arbitrary, and I've never understood what people see in it.