What is the point of Twitter?

You really need a young, techie, hip friend base to understand twitter.

My friends organize dinner/events by mass "what are you doing tonight" text messages and emails. I could see twitter replacing that by everyone just updating their status from their phones - "dinner at porky's, 6pm". And this way you can see what every one of your friends is doing and you can pick.

Overall, I think twitter will get more useful as more people get online cell phones. If many of my friends didnt have crappy free phones, I could see us all using twitter.

I use Twitter to get news headlines as well as to follow interesting people.

For example, if you had a Twitter account, you could follow these news bots:
- http://twitter.com/bbcbusiness
- http://twitter.com/bbcscitech
- http://twitter.com/bbctech
- http://twitter.com/bbcworld
- http://twitter.com/bbcsport

The above are all BBC News feeds. There are equivalent feeds for CNN and the New York Times as well as other news sources. The News Services page on the Twitter Fan Wiki has a good list.

For the politically inclined, both John Edwards and Barack Obama have Twitter accounts which are updated by their staff.

The sidebar on the right side of the Twitter Public Timeline page also features new and interesting Twitter users.

If you opt to receive Twitter updates via SMS, there are costs involved. So if you don't have SMS as part of your phone plan, you'll get hit by fees. Twitter doesn't make money from those fees, and in fact pays to send you updates via SMS.

If you're online a lot, you may prefer to get your Twitter updates via IM, the official Twitter website, or any of the many third-party applications and plug-ins that are available. I hear good things about Twitterific on the MacOS. Personally, I prefer using TwitBin, a Firefox plug-in as well as TreoTwit, a little app for the Treo mobile phone.

Bottomline, Twitter becomes interesting only when you're following companies or people that *you* find interesting.

I don't really get the point of Twitter too, but I guess you could look upon it as a feed reader for normal people ;)

I do a bit of freelance webdesigning, and there was this guy that wanted me to make a script similar to Twitter. So I made that, but when it was finished he told me he did not need it anymore. So then I posted it at a forum trying to sell it to someone else, and I also posted a demo online - and it became quite popular! That was quite exceptional ;-)

Rands has written a good response on why Twitter matters.

Dave Winer was also written a good description of what Twitter is.

I guess the best way to think about twitter, for me at least is, after say, a meeting or a class, you get a phone call, and the person on the other end is always saying “Where you at?” (I know it’s bad grammar, but work with me here). Twitter is a way of posting just that as well as sharing relevant articles RSS style with readers. I hope that helps!