I found this article on Twitter.

It was written by one of those old media types who hasn’t quite come to terms with Web 2.0. He probably dearly misses the days of snail mail, when a cell phone was just for emergencies, when if you had a friend you called them or wrote them to keep in touch. Before the days of ambient, user-created updating.

Twitter is an interesting phenomenon. There are a number of people who believe they know exactly what it’s for, and who deride those who use it differently–but really, they’re just being sort of prescriptivist. If I only want to use Twitter to follow my friends, nobody is stopping me. If I want to use it to meet people and dazzle the world with my 140-character wit, that’s fine too. You can use it to network, even, if you want. I’ve come to one real conclusion: as soon as you start saying what you think Twitter is all about, you’re wrong. It’s a communication tool.

And it’s a powerful communications tool, at that. Most people use it, to borrow the term from a friend, ambiently. I check Twitter to see what my friends are doing, as well as a few other people I find interesting. It’s a way to fairly unobtrusively keep people updated–I can learn about my Senator’s activities on the Hill while I’m finding out if anyone is going out to lunch in Cambridge.

The author of the article linked earlier believes there is no meaningful conversation happening on Twitter, that it is people in love with the tool. I think he might be missing the point here. Perhaps that’s what happens when you write for the Daily Beast. But you can’t blame the medium for the way you’re using it. (I recommend TweetDeck, by the way, if you want to follow a bunch of people without actually paying attention to them. Crisis averted.)

Oh, and one more thing:

Twitter is useful for building networks of followers–as the writer of the article mentions, Lance Armstrong is building cancer awareness. But let’s remember one thing. If Twitter were not already being used for building networks of communication–if people didn’t use it to inform the world they were excited or had a bad day or to find out their friends are hungry or tired or need help with something–it would never be useful for that sort of thing.