I was wondering why twitter is interesting or worth checking out, so I googled it. According to this article, there are seven reasons, because seven is the number of years twitter has existed. Logical.
1) Your friends are vapid idiots.
Not much point trying to dissect this. The shifty-eyed Mr. Parrack is straightforward here: if you hate everyone involved in your social life and wish they would shut up, but lack the ability to attract interesting people yourself, twitter is for you. Also, damn, that woman is fine.
2) Google news is down.
Why bother reading vetted bullshit when you get bullshit from the source? The current journalistic method of covering rapidly developing events is to read a bunch of tweets on air, or compile a nearly plagiarized list of their content under the title "breaking news". The direct route allows you to replace inaccurate, useless, outdated news outlet reports with inaccurate, useless twitter reports.
3) Track trends.
The saddest of all hobbies. There's nothing that more shamefully and unquestionably brands you as a dicksucking intellectual groupie than an earnest desire to know what the latest hot thing is.
4) Fill your news feed with ads so you can skip the customer service line.
Are you tired of waiting twelve hours for the Kraft Customer Service Desk to reply to your retarded complaint? Skip the email and use twitter! Now you can get blown off in minutes, and get the same quality form letter. The only thing you must do to receive this privilege is give whatever soulless corporate behemoth you wish to be ignored by a direct pipeline into your phone.
5) Celebrity access.
I take it back. This is the saddest of all hobbies. Note the subtle condemnation: you would follow Kermit the Frog, wouldn't you?
6) Microblogging.
In a way, I thought this was the whole point, but it turns out 99% of the twittersphere is either trying to sell you something by building their personal brand, or sell you something by building their actual brand. The other 1% is posting le gems. It might be pictures of their baby, or it might be status updates you will never, ever give a fuck about. Consider the risk: every time you read a sentence like "eating an appllllllllllieeeeeeeeee!!! #yummy", a small but significant fraction of your brain bleeds out your ear.
7) You're a fucking goldfish.
Mr. Parrack rounds out his article with another crushing, unveiled insult. Your attention span is so fucking miserable you truly believe, based on your past experience, that the things you've learned that were worth paying attention to could have been boiled down to 140 characters. If you can't fit it on the back of a fun size cereal box, forget it, man.
A little over a year ago I invested in Facebook because I used it and figured it was going places. I was pretty wrong for a while there, but I still haven't used twitter, and still don't understand it.
I'm using twitter for a short period and it's pretty good. Still hard to get followers when You're not a famous superstar or a progamer but just putting some good informations and stuff. Twitter at my signature ^^
I use twitter pretty frequently. I just use it to keep up with the random bullshit people feel like posting, that and twitter fights. Honestly, I just use it to see the vacuity that my life could fill up, and then choose not to be part of that. I find it fun to see other people use a medium that protects them so they can be extra bold with what they say.
I don't know about other countries, but in Poland, tracking trends usually leads you to an endless stream of 13-years old high school pupils with Justin Bieber avatars, complaining about teachers, weather and perils of their first menstruations. Normally, the amount of such spam should inform all of them how insignificant they and their 'problems' are, but I'm pretty sure they only type and never read what someone else is typing. And the resulting dumpster is about to make a debut on Wall Street...
...however, if you still want to keep up with pretty much all essential content of Twitter, you should follow this man.
I don't exactly like social media, but I am pretty positive about twitter. I haven't tweeted once myself and plan to keep it that way, but rather use it to follow people I'm interested in. If you're picky about who you follow, it can be a pretty nice alternative news feed and a great way to follow your favourite players. The only downside for me personally is that some of these people shitpost too much and they kinda force me to unfollow them; for instance I unfollowed TB because he tweets a lot and clogged up my feed and I'm probably going to unfollow JP because he shitposts way too much, but I still liked the few interesting tweets they posted. That being said, I think the perfect twitter-user is Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Twitter is what websites use nowadays instead of RSS.
You can also get useful updates with regard to not-yet-stories, e.g. if you follow a sport/sports team, you can get up to date information.
Also useful for silly things, like finding out if a website is down based on whether other people are complaining, or maybe the website has their own twitter account.
Plus you can use it to harass SC2 players.
It does have some valid uses, but mainly for small updates on things, rather than anything substantial, but then that's the whole point... If I've watched an F1 race and want to find out someone's getting a penalty, it's usually on Twitter before any actual news sites, for one example.
I really pity people who tweet what they eat and what they are doing (which is mostly about: "I am working out" "i am jogging" I ate X for Y. Hell nobody gives a single fuck. I can understand if you are celebrity but normal people?? And most of all, I hate those people who will tell you, "have you read my post?" or "didnt you read what I posted?" like really? why would I waste my time on your post or in twitter or facebook? Are u that important? I rather "waste" my life playing video games than reading stupid post in facebook and twitter.
The only benefit I can see from twitter is if you have a business or something relevant. Say local news, a calamity struck and you need real time coverage. Floodings sightings (common here) Traffic reports(so common here)? and if u are a celeb who want to stir shit to atttain some fame, start tweet wars or snidey remarks to other celebs. Maybe a complaint to a big greedy corp, surely would devastate their name. But for normal people? They should not have those, twitter must charge for people tweeting or accounts should be charged for tweeting and we can only be free subscribers. Free for News, local govt and helpful orgs like red cross, WHO, WWF(wildelife)
Honestly, though, it's not fair to say that you don't have an attention span longer than 140 characters just because you always tend to read short messages doesn't mean you have an attention span of no longer than 140 characters.