Amazing fact: Twitter works perfectly well in asynchronous mode. Turn off the alerts, visit Twitter once or twice a day and catch up. Catching up on Twitter is pretty easy because everything is very very short by necessity.

Web usability guys like Jacob Nielsen have been saying for a decade that the essence of writing for the web is microcontent -- we should all stop writing paragraphs and concentrate all our energy on writing decent titles and headlines. Well, Twitter is a machine for forcing people to write good headlines and nothing else. As a result, I find it wastes far less of the reader's time than any other web technology to date.