So instead of the typical internet "I don't have anything worthwhile to add, I'll just ask a rhetorical question" garbage, it would be excellent if you could actually contribute to my original question.

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I can keep up with remote friends instantly, assuming they're updating me. I don't talk to a lot of them very often.

I can get a handle on news as it comes out, like an RSS feed for my phone, which is very handy. I also follow a lot of the video game industry types, and they often have interesting things to say.

I can get a glimpse into the real lives of celebrities I give a hoot about. Musicians mostly, and an actor/personality or two. It's interesting to me to know that so-and-so musician is currently cutting a track that I'll get to hear in a few short months. I find it interesting to know that so-and-so actress is backstage at Jimmy Fallon's show and about to go on, and I get to see it later.

It's mostly voyeuristic, sure, but I feel that's the core of Twitter. Then you have the interactive part, which is a whole other conversation.

As for narcisissm, that's just the first few feeble tweets you make. You eventually start writing about things other than your shits. I've really grown to like it, and it's replacing Facebook for me as more friends get on it.

I recommend taking a deeper look, because it's much more than finding out what your friends had for breakfast.

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Think about what the original purpose of blogging was - to take the stuff people found interesting on the web and put it in a log. But then people took it as a tool for creating their own personal journals. Nothing wrong with that (except that it bastardized the term blog). Twitter can, in some ways, be viewed as going back to that original blogging concept, with the option of throwing in some comments on personal thoughts, etc.

As a tool for actual blogging, I think twitter is great. And if that's how you use it, you might find it good for that as well. And the nice thing is that the people who follow you are going to be the people who appreciate those links. You don't need to read any body else's tweets and you don't need to tweet about what you had for breakfast. It's entirely up to you as to what you want to read and say.

I do think that twitter has become an abused tool. And I think that the whole "following" thing has been its demise. Lots of people are only twittering to get followers, and are only following people because they want to be followed themselves. It's that whole "how many friends do you have" thing that ruins every social network, because as soon as you start caring about how many you have, you essentially don't care about the quality. In my mind twitter would be a much better tool if there was a way to quantify quality over quantity in followers. Maybe then people would start thinking about whether what they were saying actually mattered to anyone at all.

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