You can follow me for what good it will do you. 
#silenusdemigod
Personally, I follow people like Jewel Staite (who also has a delicious food blog), Patton Oswalt and Nathan Fillion (who is demented).
WhyNot, I’ve seen your picture. You are not any sort of fart. 
That said, I’m curious about Twitter as well. I’ve sent maybe six tweets in my life. Absent my describing something of compelling interest in my life, I don’t see why anyone would want ro follow me.
I am not a big tweeter. I have found that the accounts following me fall into 3 camps.
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spammers/scammers. These accounts have no tweets I assume they want me to find out who is following me so that I check the info on their profile link in twitter.
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local news papers who noticed I started following the major local news paper and hope I will follow them bringing in people to their website not a whole lot different than 1 but there seems to be a genuine lack of scamming.
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people who follow me by mistake thinking I will post interesting cooking/Spanish tweets.
Fiendish Astronaut is right - the biggest value of Twitter is being almost totally missed by this thread. Twitter is a real time, up to the second feed from many thousands of people all over the world, which can be tailored down to a specific topic very easily.
This can range from useful things, like coordinating protests or elections and campaigns, to more mundane but fun things, like following a sports team. Last night, leading up to the Giants/9ers game, I was wondering what the conditions were really like at Candlestick, so I followed #nyg for a bit and was treated to dozens of pictures and updates from folks who were there about how bad the rain was, etc. This was a lot more informative than any official media coverage at the time.
It’s really changed how you are able to follow events in the media (for better or for worse). It’s a custom tailored “hive mind” stream. Want to know what thousands of people think about what someone important just said on TV right now? Want to know what’s going on with a natural disaster in real time? Political upheaval? and on and on.
For me, it’s like a message board that’s tailored to my tastes. If you’re a Cafe Society type, you can follow people associated with your favorite shows and books. Sometimes the writers behind the shows or the actors will live tweet their thoughts on the episode as it airs, sort of like getting the DVD extras in real time. You can also follow fellow fans and discuss the book or show. If you like the Game Room, follow the sports insiders, fans and players. If you love politics or enjoy sharing and reading mundane things, there are people on twitter who provide that, too. I don’t try to or need to read every tweet. If a tweet is really important, a lot of people will retweet it, reply to it or favorite it, which raises its chances of being seen.
What OG said.
I never got the whole “follow Lady Gaga” appeal of Twitter, but I love the news aspect of Twitter. I first learned about the death of Michael Jackson on Twitter, probably a good 20 minutes before I saw it on TV. I follow the local news media and the national sources - so I hear about wrecks on the highway in the a.m., and breaking news as it happens.
I like to follow things like the presidential debates or sporting events with Twitter. There’s usually good snark or commentary in real time which is cool.
I don’t really follow friends. I do follow my students who follow me, who use it as a status update, but you can easily scroll past those. I like how I can get caught up in hours of tweets in a few minutes, because they’re short, and important stuff ends up being RT’ed.
Most news and media orgs have links to major stories so you can easily learn more about a topic by following links.
I hardly use Facebook and don’t find myself at CNN.com so much now that I have Twitter on my phone and Mac.
This is a good use of twitter, but you still have to be careful. Because anybody can post anything to twitter, and people will re-tweet “big news,” false reports can spread very quickly and any efforts by the original tweeter to “take back” what they said are futile. This is the thing I hate the most about twitter.
A good example of this happened Saturday night with an early false announcement of Joe Paterno’s death.
I use Twitter as a direct communication tool. I have people with whom I correspond somewhat regularly via Twitter, and we have a regular chat on Twitter, as well. It’s just an almost-real-time way to converse where the conversation is preserved for future reference.
Exactly. Why is it more important to get the information quickly if I can’t know if it’s accurate? The value of news is not in getting it first, but in getting it right.
The only reason I’ve seen for using Twitter is that you can put the owners of websites you frequent on your feed, and then, if something goes wrong with the site, you’ll know what’s up.
Then again, I find it just as easy to just go to their Twitter after I’ve discovered the site problem, rather than actually putting them on some sort of feed.
Then again, my sole use of RSS is Live Bookmarks. I don’t get why I would want to essentially have all updates to various sites emailed to me. And it royally pisses me off that Firefox is planning to kill Live Bookmarks because they can’t be assed to update them with the new faster architecture.
And then there are still two issues:
- Which feeds do you subscribe to?
- Unless you’re constantly looking at your Twitter feeds, then you really don’t get much of the advantage of timeliness.
So it seems to me it’s only really useful if you’re going to dedicate all your waking hours to checking it.
They don’t. This is one of the biggest obstacles to getting people to understand Twitter. For the vast majority of people, there is little to no reason to be a contributor to the world of Twitter. The benefit to Twitter to the vast, unwashed masses is as a clearinghouse of information. For instance…
I’m a big baseball fan, with a strong interest in fantasy sports. So I follow a number of experts and writers that keep me as up-to-date as is humanly possible on any other website.
I’m also a fan of Bill Gates’ philathropic ventures, so I follow him, the Gates Foundation, and a number of other foundations that do similar work and collaborate together. Without Twitter, I’d have to make an extremely concerted effort to gather press releases and news articles on those topics, something I’d probably not end up doing.
I also follow local city politics. I hate reading the paper, but I follow a number of reporters, media personnel and city officials that do a good job of having a presence on Twitter. There’s far more interaction and follow-up that takes place there than on, say, the comments section of a news article.
And while I mentioned earlier that I don’t contribute to Twitter, I will send people I follow questions and comments. I get a fair bit of response in return, which is cool. Not often you can be watching an episode of SportsCenter and point at the screen and say, “Hey, I’ve interacted with that guy - he retweeted my comment”.
- I am a middle aged fart as well, (chronologically, anyway) and two people that I follow are Nate Silver (538 blog) who is a statistical analyst who looks at polls and feeds them into his own formula to predict future political trends. It was fascinating over the last week to see the Romney collapse and Gingrich rise in real time, well before the traditional media could report it.
I also follow a beat writer for my Alma Mater’s sports teams. Being 1,000 miles away, I would never know if my team’s point guard rolled an ankle in practice unless I went to the team page on Yahoo! or ESPN several times a day. This way, if something happens, it comes to me.
- I send both of these two to my phone, so I don’t have to check online all the time. It only gets annoying when Silver live-blogs the debates.
I use it to follow local news. I’ve subscribed to the twitter feeds of a few local journalists and politicians as well as some neighborhood bloggers. It keeps things condensed as I just have to follow links to interesting stories. I usually check it in the evenings while I am watching TV.
Well like any breaking story, you have to verify and check. Traditional media outlets get it wrong sometimes too…
Twitter is a lot like a town square. Something happens, and people are talking about what they saw, who they know that witnessed the event, and so on. Like any media source, it’s useful to triangulate.
Tonight is a good example of why Twitter is useful. We’re expecting lots of rain and wind tonight in Austin, and the conditions are right for funnel clouds and possibly tornadoes. All the local news weather crews are tweeting eyewitness reports in real time, which is a nice complement to the national weather service on the radio.
Hmm…still seems like Facebook to me. Perhaps Facebook has “appropriated” so much of Twitter that to a geezer like me ;), the speed of the news, commentary, etc, while slower than Twitter, is fast enough.
But Facebook only concerns itself with your friends. On Twitter you can follow anybody (unless they have locked their stream) and you can search for a term and see every Tweet in the world that uses that term get displayed to you in real time. You can’t do that in Facebook at all. It’s a small but very crucial difference.
I just used one of the hashtags to find job vacancies throughout Ireland.
I’m not one for autographs, or going to a convention, and I live far away from where famous folk hang out, but I definitely get a thrill when someone I admire replies to one of my tweets. It’s a fan connection that’s unique, and suits my situation ideally.
I also follow a few friends, and it is a good place to say what’s on your mind, especially if you can craft it into something pithy or meaningful within the 140 character limit.
Ah, see now we’ve found the REAL problem. I can’t be that succinct. Ever. 
I think a really good real life example is what happened in Iran during their elections (and subsequent protests). It was mostly fueled by Twitter - both the organization of the protests as well as the dissemination of information to the west. Here’s a really good article. Facebook would never be capable of this, because it’s limited to information dissemination between people with an established connection (Friends and Likes).
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html