A silicon valley webapp used by somalian terrorists. The modern, "connected" world is weird sometimes.
To answer your question, and although I don't use it myself, some of my friends tell me they use it a bit like IRC: when you want to discuss of a particular topic, instead of joining a particular channel you ask your question with a specific hashtag (hey, IRC channel names are hashtags after all!) and it starts a discussion. It's like a more fluid IRC where chatrooms are created, deleted, merge and fork all the time. It sound good in principle, but I like the open and distributed IRC more.
When I started out on it, I was a freelancer. It was a great way to chat about work and trivia to other people doing similar jobs, whether I had met them or not - a sort of online "water-cooler" I guess or a more visible IRC. In fact, I remember describing how to use it as "sign up, follow interesting people, talk to strangers".
But now it's much less about the conversations (I only really converse with the people I know in real-life, so it becomes a sort of public text-messaging). Instead, it's become a broadcast medium - communication is much more one-way and because of that, the number of retweets you get for your "pithy insight" becomes all the more important.
I know many people that use Facebook (including myself). It's a website that almost freaking everybody is on; it's used for sharing stuff from daily lives, instant messaging, organizing social events.
I have no idea what Twitter is for.
In fact, we sat around a table earlier this year and were chatting about a piece of news that mentioned some exclusive content via Facebook, and realised that none of us had access. And that was fine by us, we don't really get what Facebook is for, and we just went back to talking and continued some of the conversations next day on Twitter.
I suspect this is just smack talk. Facebook does everything that twitter does and about a million other things too. You can tweet on Facebook, aggregate tweets, re-tweet (they call it share). Just that the eco-system around Twitter, like Twitpic and such, is integrated.
I'm the opposite of what you claim to be. I use Facebook but I can't understand Twitter. I've tried using it and have several accounts but beyond being a newsfeed like Facebook's walls I can't see the attraction (except of course that it happens that your social network use Twitter as opposed to some other medium).
Win me over?
Twitter just fits in comfortably with how myself and friends operate and if Facebook does that for you then fabulous - everyone gets what they want. No winning over necessary.
We probably meet completely different people.
I also have a band which has a Twitter account which is used to keep people up to date as mentioned above, and I have a music blog twitter account which I use to review gigs etc...
I have a pretty good Metal Twitter list here if anyone is interested: https://twitter.com/ColinHugh/lists/metal-news
I also use the trending topics on Twitter to follow the 'real' news. Can you do that in an aggregator, or do you need to have preselected the websites you want to hear from?
The consequence is that after seven years Tweeter simply ignored by half of the IT population.
Targeted ephemeral public communication and sharing.
Effectively, nothing else does this and keeps it concise. Brevity is the soul of wit.
Amazing that this author is so upset about what this random website has done to his life. I have no idea how he could have found enough value in it to have integrated it into his life so deeply. Nor can I understand why he would continue using it if it made him unhappy.
In short, seven years later, I still don't get what Twitter is for or why anybody would use it.