I never understood the appeal behind Twitter myself. I don't have an account (nor one on Facebook) and I only use it infrequently to search various trends when my curiosity is piqued. Twitter is an indispensable tool to perform sentimental analysis and analyze/predict societal tendencies and trends in general.

But as a social media tool? People always keep saying that there's plenty of interesting information to be obtained from following technical individuals. I just don't see that. What can I get that I won't obtain from blogs attached to my RSS reader, or even just by going to high-profile communities and message boards like /r/netsec, HN and Slashdot/SoylentNews/AltSlashdot to use as digests?

Finally, even if you do find golden nuggets, they're buried between layers of inanity and mundane content. Who would've thought a communication medium limited to 140 characters would suffer from that?

I guess the only real benefit is that I can directly speak to tech figures, although in a highly constrained format. I don't think I'd want to, though, especially considering plenty of those people would likely see you as a Luddite for still using email and IRC. Twitter's very webdev-centric, I find.

I waste enough time on the web as is. Adding Twitter to the mix would offer no benefit. Though I'm assuming employers insist on it?