What do you guys use it for? What's the target market for this exactly? I certainly don't expect people to follow me, some random guy on the internet, so there's no incentive for me to tweet myself. Besides news articles, what interesting things do you read from tweets?
That's Twitter.
Thanks for the explanation though!
When Twitter started it was a geek medium and dominated by nerd types. Back in 2007 it was almost a guarantee that I could follow any one and find interesting (to me) conversations and topics. For someone with poor social skills and living in a part of the world with no tech scene, it was an amazing opportunity to meet people and be part of a nascent community.
I'm pretty sure that if I have a career in tech today is in part due to my early involvement in Twitter.
With time, as its usage broadened, it became more and more difficult to find who to follow. Twitter seemingly tried very hard to divorce itself from the nerd community and became pop culture. Once it became Obama's and Justin Biever's medium it was pretty much ruined.
Today, it's still possible to find interesting communities buried within the nonsense but it's getting more and more difficult to do so.
(Non native speaker, sorry if something does not make sense)
It's also a good way to get news from very high quality sources. Lots of domain experts and freelance journalists tweet, and their feeds can be far more informative and timely than regular media coverage.
Peter Nickeas at the Trib does real-time crime reporting from the South Side of Chicago; @peternickeas
I get a pretty constant feed of Middle East stuff that I don't see elsewhere from Laura Rozen (though I'm uncertain of her ideological tilt, she pulls in lots of random other sources); @lrozen
There are a couple court reporters in Chicago that I've picked up.
Saved You A Click does a pretty good job of condensing most of modern journalism into a short Twitter feed; @SavedYouAClick
M&A/corpdev comings and goings in the Valley, startupland's "Weddings Section", that's @pinboard.
Of course, there's @scotusblog.
There are lots of kinds of news that Twitter is just a lot better at delivering than websites or (gag) RSS. Since it's so easy to compose twerps, especially once you get the hang of it, it seems like it draws a lot of reporters in who would not do real-time reporting so aggressively in a different medium, but will do it so long as the expectation is set that they only have to tap out 140 characters an hour.
This is also an advantage Twitter has over Facebook.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/tweets-mov...
So, I follow a bunch of breaking news accounts and stuff like my power utility, my hosting providers' status accounts, etc.
Prior to Twitter, the fastest medium for newsy information was web forums; Fark.com in particular was always very fast with breaking news. Twitter is faster.
The other value is all the folks you can follow. It's good for entertainment--I highly recommend the @pinboard account for amazing tech industry satire.
But it's also a great way to learn. I want to learn more about data visualization, so I started following accounts related to that. I started with Mike Bostock (D3.js author), and then looked at who he was retweeting, etc. And Twitter is not bad at suggesting accounts to follow once you move into a new area.
But these people curate a retweeting session which I find interesting :
https://twitter.com/HuddersfieldBiz : Use #HuddersfieldHour every Thurs 8-9 PM to discuss #Huddersfield, Promote your business & find out what's going on!
I have also found value in connecting with other community groups in the locale.
So, for me, it offers geographically related content which I don't seem to find elsewhere