* Serendipity of content. I follow a stack of interesting folk. They tweet about interesting stuff. If I have some downtime that I want to fill with something interesting to read I can find something (NOTE: this does not mean I go to twitter every time I have a quiet time. I like quiet time. I have books and shit too ;-)
* Serendipity of people. I've met people in RL via twitter. Folk have come up to me at conferences and events and said "Hi - I follow you on twitter". I've done the reverse. It's been a great ice breaker in meeting new people. For me Facebook is something for the people I already know. Twitter is something that has let me meet new people.
* It's got me work. I talk about the stuff I'm passionate about. People see that passion and start a conversation.
* You can fit a surprising amount into 140 characters. In fact the discipline of getting useful info into 140 characters is a great one to acquire. It's a crash course in headline/lede writing.
* It's a place to talk to some of my friends. I live in a fairly rural area of the UK at the moment. A bunch of my "real" friends are not local. The ones who are not on facebook, or email, tend to be on twitter.
[Edit: Oh yes. One more. Access to smart people. For example a couple of weeks back I couldn't remember the term "Reification". Took my twitter followers about ten minutes to go from my dumb "What's that word for things that aren't things (e.g. the Economy)" to "Reification Fallacy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) which was what I was trying to remember]
Sorry, I still don't understand. I checked your profile, visited your twitter profile, found out that you're following around 2100 people. How many "tweets" is that per day? Do you really read them all? I feel I'd go insane doing so much "context switches of mind" to read 140-char messages of 2100 different people.
I also tried to see some random samples of the tweets from the people you follow. My impression: most of them have the form:
"@somebody: yeah right" "@somebodyelse: no, I don't" "mumble mumble sil.ly/asdasdew" etc.
I know, such "substantial" messages are not only twitter-specific. I believe you that you enjoy the whole experience. I just don't understand what's in there for me, from the people like you who like it I get the impression that I'm missing something and it frustrates me still that I can't "get" what that is. Thanks.
Ha! No. Not even remotely. Neither do I read every HN comment or every HN post.
I don't drink the river. I dip in a cup occasionally.
I do read anything that's directed at me as an individual.
I have a couple of twitter lists that friends are on that I pay a little bit more attention to (twitter lists are ways of grouping people in twitter - think Google Circles with an even worse UX ;-).
I have a computationally generated twitter list of folk I've 'talked' to recently (via http://conversationlist.com/).
I have a couple of topic-specific lists I glance a weather eye over every day or so to see if anything interesting pops up.
Otherwise it's just serendipitous access when I feel the need for brain popcorn.
* Serendipity of content. I follow a stack of interesting folk. They tweet about interesting stuff. If I have some downtime that I want to fill with something interesting to read I can find something (NOTE: this does not mean I go to twitter every time I have a quiet time. I like quiet time. I have books and shit too ;-)
* Serendipity of people. I've met people in RL via twitter. Folk have come up to me at conferences and events and said "Hi - I follow you on twitter". I've done the reverse. It's been a great ice breaker in meeting new people. For me Facebook is something for the people I already know. Twitter is something that has let me meet new people.
* It's got me work. I talk about the stuff I'm passionate about. People see that passion and start a conversation.
* You can fit a surprising amount into 140 characters. In fact the discipline of getting useful info into 140 characters is a great one to acquire. It's a crash course in headline/lede writing.
* It's a place to talk to some of my friends. I live in a fairly rural area of the UK at the moment. A bunch of my "real" friends are not local. The ones who are not on facebook, or email, tend to be on twitter.
[Edit: Oh yes. One more. Access to smart people. For example a couple of weeks back I couldn't remember the term "Reification". Took my twitter followers about ten minutes to go from my dumb "What's that word for things that aren't things (e.g. the Economy)" to "Reification Fallacy" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy) which was what I was trying to remember]