Those not on Twitter, I've no beef with you. I didn't get it. Sounded completely ridiculous to me (I may have characterized it as fuckin' stupid! a time or two). Well, I was wrong.
I was dead wrong.
And I think it's because someone has come up with a technology that roughly emulates (provided it's used as such), the natural way humans best communicate.
For more than two-and-a-half decades, I have been inexorably tied to the Internet. First on Compuserve, Prodigy (remember that?), and America Online. Then, I graduated to a straight ISP pipe to the wild & woolly Internet, using installed software to access it. Email apps, and especially: USENET readers. I won't go into it, as USENET is pretty passe, now, but back in the day, you had all the world's most inquisitive and argumentative minds there. It was really something to behold, and to be a part of. In the space of a couple of years, I had logged well over 5,000 pages of discussions and arguments with others.
...Well, it was better than watching ER.
Eventually I moved on, started a successful business that's still going strong, but I also kept tabs, followed along, eventually started a blog, and now I'm on Twitter, of all goddamned things.
It really is ridiculous, but irresistible at the same time. But back to my point.
I'm less than convinced that intense, deliberate and thorough debate is where we ought to be. We have our blogs and comments. So, we can toss up our thoroughly considered work there, and those who want can comment, disagree, debate, and so on.
Twitter is an entirely different animal. It costs little time or effort to tweet, and that's its prime virtue. I probably only seriously look at 30% of the tweets I see from those I follow, skimming the rest. I try to get a sense out of the max 140 characters anyone can send. That in itself is an important dynamic. How much meaning can you convey in 140 characters? So, you get good at that. Then you get god at getting a feel for others. Do I want to click on the link? What if I miss something good? There's lots more good to come; don't sweat it.
What it all adds up to is a pretty streamlined way to exchange far more underlying information. Hell, I'm about 500 posts behind in my Google reader, for all the blogs I follow, but I can easily keep up-to-date on Twitter (Facebook, too), and I can act quickly on the things I find -- either to Retweet them to my followers, do a Facebook update, a blog, or all three.
To bring this full circle, how did we operate out on the Savannah for a couple of million years? Did we examine every single thing to an exhaustive conclusion, or did we develop sorting skills, and then quickly deal with the stuff we deemed important? I think the latter. And I think that's why Twitter works and will continue to work.
Funny thing is, I think Facebook could be a short lived thing. It's based on friends, and friends can get tired of friends -- at least in the sense of too much information, and that's on many levels. Twitter is based on non-mutual followership, which is much more natural to my way of thinking. People are not always peers or equals. We all have things to learn from others, but it's the rare case outside of family when that's mutual.
By the way, my tweets are here.
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I spend more time on Twitter now than I do on Facebook. And I find myself spending time on Tweet Deck instead of in google reader, too. I love the social networking aspect of both, but with Twitter I can learn a bit more about things I like from others with the same interests, so it's a two for one!
I use tweet deck too. tweetfon for my iphone. tweet deck also accesses facebook, but it's pretty lame and I miss out on a lot unless I go to the facebook page, which is pretty rich.
I concur with much of your post here — I started on Twitter in December, and my experiences have been similar. RSS is less important once you are on Twitter, at least for those blogs you read that also have Twitter accounts that Tweet their blog post links. And I agree that Twitter is just a very natural, great tool for getting a wealth of info — and it is fun tweaking who you follow, and who you read carefully/consistently and who you just follow for the occasional tweet of interest… definitely where TweetDeck groups come in handy (I just wish it would allow more than 10 columns, since another great use is for hashtag search columns.
You are newer, so this has perhaps not happened for you yet… but I'd be curious if at some point you get the same result that many of us have experienced on Twitter… and it isn't so positive really. I'm talking about its impact on how you read. I sometimes find myself jumping around the page when I'm reading a book or article — my mind is trying to quickly move on to the next sentence/paragraph, because it has been conditioned by Twitter. Not just Twitter me thinks, but the web more broadly, but I think esp. from Twitter. Thoughts?
That all said, I don't think that Facebook will be shortlived. It serves a different purpose. People need a place to connect with and stay connected with old HS and college friends/acquaintances, people you meet on business trips, and so on — your extended network of people. Plus, Facebook is way more than just Facebook status updates (the closest equiv. of Twitter messages), since you can post photos, and rich profile info. I enjoy learning a bit more about people — favorite music/movies/etc., political leanings, and so on. Twitter could add more such features, but I kinda like Twitter being kept the way it is, and Facebook being the broader experience and on the different two-way "friend" model rather than the one-way "follower" model of Twitter.
Twitter = ThomasStone