Among other things, it is the fastest source of news. And in news (as the name suggests), fast is everything.
Unless this is solved, we'll just see spam/false news stories all over twitter, and the service will become useless.
Also I don't think it's the fastest source of news. In the event of 'sudden shock' news stories, I've usually heard via IM/IRC. The fastest source of news is word of mouth, phone, webchat/IM, etc.
The other problem is that once you've heard MJ is dead, would you really want to see 100 bajillion tweets expressing shock at said news. It's very noisy.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
How do I know who is accurate and who isn't on twitter? I have no idea who is a real journalist on there, and who is a 4chan anarchist.
There's no weight - everyones tweets are equal in search, which is a good and bad thing, but mainly bad IMHO.
That doesn't mean real time search will get fixed in the same way or prove to be useful in the same way. It just means that when any such new medium (twitter, web, cup of tea) arises, we should expect to find comments like yours.
(i) TMZ (heh) (ii) Twitter (iii) After about 30 minutes, google/google news
So Twitter is essentially good for the 30 minute gap.
Obviously there's value with getting news fast. Twitter helps with this. But is there any room left in the real-time market? Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo index real-time conversations, the only thing left is building widgets and features onto Twitter. In otherwords, the oneriot's, webmynds, crowdeye's and kikin's are becoming basically worthless. The once ripe market of Real-time search is now filled by Google(relevancy) and Twitter(real-time).