Twitter articles are popular here, as in other social news sites and blogs, because of selection bias. Who likes twitter? People who always have something to write. Who posts stuff on the web? People who always have something to write. It's the same reason most of the people who apply for a job are idiots, because they just have to do it over and over.
Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A small circle of people dominate the crowd's attention, largely by talking voluminously among themselves. You might be able to learn something new, but you'll have to filter out a lot of noise. And you're probably better served by finding a person or two and having an actual conversation, or writing an essay, or actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.
actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.
Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity.
Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent -- we should all stop writing paragraphs and concentrate all our energy on writing decent titles and headlines. Well, Twitter is a machine for forcing people to write good headlines and nothing else. As a result, I find it wastes far less of the reader's time than any other web technology to date.
Overall, I think Twitter resembles the conference circuit. A small circle of people dominate the crowd's attention, largely by talking voluminously among themselves. You might be able to learn something new, but you'll have to filter out a lot of noise. And you're probably better served by finding a person or two and having an actual conversation, or writing an essay, or actually doing some work instead of being interrupted every few minutes.