also, http://twitter.com/zadr is mine if anyone's remotely interested.

On one end of the spectrum, I follow people who have similar interests as me (Ruby, Rails, Clojure, Arduino, Macs, etc). Lots of them are well-known in their various niche communities. Yes, you do get some degree of "drinking coffe" and "walking the dog" type of notifications, but a lot more "hey, this piece of software is cool", and "I just released this new library" messages. The signal to noise ratio is really pretty good, assuming you are choosy about who you follow. If you follow interesting people, they will help you find interesting things. I wrote about this a little bit, particularly about how I read RSS feeds much less now because of Twitter: http://larrywright.me/blog/articles/209-the-coming-decline-o...

On the other end of the spectrum, I do follow people that I know personally, or that live in the same town (it's small). What I get from these people is different. It's more akin to meeting down at the local coffee shop and catching up. There's value in this as well.

It's very easy to dismiss Twitter unless you look closely. You're right, in a sense: I don't care what a random person is doing right now. But that's not really what Twitter is about, and until you use it for a bit, that's hard to understand.

If you want to try it, find some people whose blogs you enjoy reading, and follow them for a bit on Twitter. I think you'll be surprised at what you find.

If you do, you can find me at http://twitter.com/larrywright

Twitter does, however, provide me with insights into the people I know (business or otherwise) and keeps me on the edge with developments in several communities I'm involved with. For example, I'm a Ruby guy, and so I follow a lot of Rubyists.. you can bet I'm pretty clued in to brand new Ruby libraries, etc, as they come out (or even just in a very quiet personal beta).

Explaining Twitter is next to impossible. Unless you've been using it in anger for a few months, you don't have a clue what it is, but then suddenly.. one day you do.

Yes, it is. There's a reason why Knuth answers regular mail as a batch process (once every few months), for example. A common productivity tip is to limit yourself to checking email only a few times a day. The productivity harm caused be frequent context switching has been well-documented, especially if you're doing something context-intensive like programming.

But you don't have to deal with e-mail as a dribble, as you say. I deal with e-mail as a batch process, just several times a day instead of once every few months. Ditto for Twitter and the like.

Not sure I explained that well, but I think you can get my meaning.

Twitter can be a distraction (and I let it be more than I should), but like anything else it can be managed.

By just putting in 10 or 15 mins of your day, you will be able to generate a lot of value from your twitter account. It is like a brand, better you tweet, more followers you have (how you utilize them depends on you).

Giving you an example, I have around 225 followers, so whenever i tweet a link, i get around 50 views. There are people with more followers like 1000 who i am assuming get around 250 views for every link they post. Mike Arrington has close to 25k - 30k followers, i am pretty much sure he get lot of traffic from twitter and he is also socializing with his users.

ps: I like your books :)

Weather, perhaps? Stuff like e-mail, most news, IM, chat, or whatever are ruled out though, even this very site.

I think his point relates to "say it for the sake of saying it" as opposed to "doing this for a reason." So, case in point, I come here to get in debates. I use Tumblr to store my ideas (I don't follow other users, and I've tried to disable the following count so I'm not influenced by my far-too-many followers). But for Twitter, I see it as "I'm here to talk for the sake of talking." I don't get it. As it is, now that my Twitter shows my Tumblr posts, I've been slowly picking up Twitter followers, and it baffles me. I follow people using RSS, and I've asked before to allow HN to give me a "new replies" RSS feed so I can centralize everything (and internally, versus on an open field like FriendFeed). I'm horrified at the thought of adding yet another outlet to post links and say random things - there're too many already.

It's a shame because I like how minimal Twitter is. It's zen in a way. I just don't see the point to having one and keeping it: one site is enough, and my poison is Tumblr.

My grandmother would never have seen the point of e-mail beyond sending "letters" to each other.. but we all know now it goes deeper than that.

People who don't see extended value in Twitter now are like my theoretical grandmother and her myopic view of e-mail.

(EDIT - Why would you downvote me for answering his question? Someone explain why twitter is such an amazing tool that I should incorporate it into my already busy life...)

If there is some real-time trouble (e.g. you couldn't access your Gmail account, or Hacker News), Twitter is the first place where you can confirm your suspicions (and sometimes even find a solution/explanation).

On Twitter you can find out in minutes if there is anybody else having the same trouble as you, instead of hours till Google indexes blogs with complaints.

Searching Twitter is now my default reaction to figure out what's going on:

http://search.twitter.com/

Now, having said that, there is absolutely no reason anyone should have down voted you for answering the question.

Do you need it? No. Can it be highly beneficial? Yes.

Some reasons: I see no need for it. I don't like exposing myself that much. It doesn't allow for material long enough to be useful.

I also don't have a facebook profile, nor a Myspace, but I will make a Linked-In one.

I stood for election last year, and I wasn't thrilled that I had to make my name, address, email address and phone numbers as publicly available as it was. I guess some folks don't care much about their privacy, and some folks care too much.

For people 18 year old and younger, there's never not been an Internet. When I was 8 I had already been told a bunch of horrifying "keep your security" stories. I was probably younger than 15 when I first heard about sites like 4chan terrorizing people for years on-end. The result, though, isn't that you hide yourself (which is the reaction I see in my father especially). It's that you decide exactly how you'll let yourself be seen online, you avoid things that'll get you in trouble, and you don't take the Internet too seriously. Most harassment things won't happen if you sound reasonable, don't botch up spelling, avoid fanfiction, and don't actively taunt Anonymous. Similarly, a lot of stuff online is less serious than you can let yourself believe: if you get threatening calls, they almost never mean a thing. People troll. It's easy, and it's become a part of society.

In the end, the sheer amount of information means that almost nobody gets targeted. You're a small bubble in a vast ocean. We young brats see it like that, anyway: now, everything is considered public information but still under your control. (I was called into a teacher's office for something I said on Facebook: I said that it was my private space, that the teacher had no right accessing my information, and that the person who took my stuff off of Facebook was violating terms and against the law. She couldn't do anything after that.) So it doesn't become a matter of privacy or not: it becomes a matter of just what is most public.

I agree with you about Twitter, though. Constraints aren't particularly useful in its case.

With search tools and things like Tweetdeck, following is not even that important. You follow a keyword, and it works wonders.

Reason being: Tumblr does everything I'd want to do with Twitter, but it's more flexible. I can write more, express myself. I don't see the point in small blurb updates, I don't care to post small, clever quips, and above all I find the interface bland after more than 5 minutes of usage. I tried Twitteriffic, but I had applications that do nothing but connect to the web.

EDIT: /unalone/

Do people ever use IRC productively? I'm curious how that would work.

http://twitter.com/davidnwelton

http://twitter.com/ashleyw

So, uh, who is working on an online service to keep track of all the online services I use? ;-)

Edit: Found it - http://twitter.com/billmoorier

It's just links, mostly to technical-, math- or education-related things. I try to keep the off-topic stuff to a minimum (I think there are maybe 4 or 5 tweets total out of a few hundred that don't follow the formula.)

http://twitter.com/dhess

I do have a couple of concerns about using Twitter for this purpose:

* according to the Twitter API docs, they only keep 3200 tweets "online" at a time for any given account.

* the dependency on the TinyURL service.

* Twitter has historically spotty reliability.

So I'm working on an archiving solution, which I hope to make available soon. If you're the hacker type, it might appeal to you, too. I'll give a pointer to it on my Twitter feed when it's ready for testing.

Available in full flavor and low fat:

http://twitter.com/scotchi

http://twitter.com/directededge

Didn't have a Facebook profile for the longest time... then started working with a client who wanted to build a Facebook application. Created a profile, and it snowballed from there :/

give me a shout (or an @, whatever the cool kids call it these days) if you're in nyc.

don't twitter often, but try to understand its appeal and user dynamics.

http://twitter.com/NotoriousBRK

Generally pretty profane and/or nonsensical, but I let the occasional nugget of wisdom slip out.

Might I suggest #hn for hashtag categorization?

Don't listen to the others! I am the one true prophet.