We have been here before. I remember a company in 2001 that built some sort of business app that routed all its traffic over the public Gnutella network - just because. When I see people doing something over Twitter just because, that's overhyped.

Okay, I'll bite on some of this.

marketing over Twitter

Compared to email marketing? For which I cannot enforce opt-in? Which deluges me in content that I don't necessarily have time to read? Shall I even bother comparing it to telemarketing -- is there any question what will win that comparison? Advantage: Twitter.

customer support over Twitter

I've never heard of one-to-one customer support over Twitter. Surely email is better, except when the spam filters intervene. For FAQs there are wikis and forums and good old web pages and new-fangled ticket tracking sites.

But what about generic, time-sensitive or high-priority hints, suitable for a sizeable fraction of the userbase? "Sorry for the outage; we are working on it." "Everyone should know that there's a security bug that has just been fixed." "Today 50 people have asked about Feature X. It's right there in the Bookmarks menu. Read the updated FAQ." These are the kinds of messages that aren't a good fit for bulk email. There's never really been a good venue for them before. [1] Twitter is going to spawn a lot more of them.

I'm not sure about payments over Twitter, but I know better than to laugh: I remember when PayPal was hilariously funny.

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[1] Okay, RSS feeds. But Twitter is, among other things, an RSS feed that non-technical humans can understand. And that is constrained to be blessedly short. And there are other semantic and social differences.

Comcast http://twitter.com/ComcastCares

I expect Facebook to do more to let companies better engage with their users. One problem is the privacy. Facebook conversations are largely hidden from the public eye. How will my wall-to-wall comment about shitty Comcast service get picked up by them?

I do think the celeb hype around twitter is just insane. Multiple talk show hosts spend a lot of time begging people to sign up. You really can't pay for that kind of PR.

The question contains its own answer, partially. I can see wanting lighter blogging tools, but what I don't quite get is why so many people want something limited to such short messages. Does the majority of the population want all conversation reduced to soundbite-sized posts? What am I missing here?

The girl who is responsible for such viral ninjitsu memes as "I heard it on twitter first that a plane landed in the hudson.. safely" makes Seth Godin look like an agorophobic dislexik.

Google you search websites. Twitter you search conversations.

More ppl have conversations then have a website! The hype is accurate as it will prove very complimentary to Google or become a Google killer. The crowd is rarely wrong; if it was Google wouldn't be what it is today!

IMHO, the one and only thing they did right, and which made all the difference, was to implement SMS as a gateway. This made it possible for everyone to use twitter before actual twitter clients existed. And ironically this in turn forced them to make the service completely feature deprived - bizarrely short length, no links, no images, no formatting in messages ...

If someone had proposed it to me I would have immediately said they needed a richer client - how could they start so far behind what everyone already expected from a simple IM client? Well, I think it was exactly that which actually drove the success of the whole thing.

Personally, I still don't see the point and I'm a little irritated at Facebook for implementing a Twitter-like interface core.