Only in your little corner of the world. I honestly don't know a single person who uses twitter on a day to day basis.
Twitter is so common in tech industry circles - so many announcements , debates, and moments happen there weekly that I would think it's essential if you care about that stuff.
Truth is there is no canonical place to get the pulse of what's going on in the tech world: each of Reddit, HN, Twitter, or various aggregation sites have their filter and regulars. But Twitter seems to have the widest net.
Twitter is the best broadcasting platform. The true challenges are to control spam level and be able to display enough ads to monetise it.
I'm a late adopter of twitter but if you know how to use it is a great tool: follow less than 20 accounts, info is still possible to digest and the number of ads is not enough to annoy you.
Twitter: 500M tweets per day https://about.twitter.com/company
WhatsApp: 13B messages per day http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/whatsapp-now-has-700m-user...
Facebook + FB Messenger - WhatsApp: ~30B messages per day http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/22/facebook-voip-not-facebook-...
In what world?