Twitter= Sustainable value? YES!

Of what value is twitter to me?

Me; this 21st century Renaissance man, IMM (in my mind), with a multitude of interests and being very busy of course (don't we all say we are very busy?), what does twitter do for me? Is twitter unique, or just another social media fad that will soon be but a cool shadow in the alleyway of the unused, unwanted and unloved?
I use twitter as a search engine for what is happening in the world and it works very well indeed. With the "lists" feature I can list people, writers, who have their tight little grips on a certain niche of information.

An example would be the "aviation" field, I can follow @flightblogger, @runwaygirl and @Heather_Poole among maybe 25 accounts in all. this gives me a tightly focused news feed from people/sources that I have winnowed out to be valuable to possibly just me.
I ultimately do this myself every day. I hardly ever buy an actual newspaper anymore, I go online, from computer or phone, and scan several news sources for the bits that seem most tasty and useful. If I can locate others that seem of a like mind and they list/mention what they are finding of interest on twitter, it really saves me time, all the while giving me a different, broader perspective, and takes me to places I wouldn't locate on my own. Obviously, searching other people's list of those they follow on twitter gives me leads to the talking heads and info-generators that are tangential to my own life.

I don't see this same ability on; Facebook, Plaxo, Linkin or many of the other social media sites and see them as more of a white pages of who they are. Rated at the top of "social media" are also Reddit and Digg, and they are great but that news is unfiltered as to a particular group of people, and "Youtube" serves a different purpose as well. These sites are often what people put links to on twitter, I don't see them as supplanting twitter. Twitter's use, as far as tweets generated, is over a billion tweets a month http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/10/twitter-now-more-than-1-billion-tweets-per-month/ . Twitter continues to grow in importance regardless of what you may have heard. In the same way that snow in D.C. does not supplant the impact of global warming/climate change, so too does the fact that the "dude in the cubicle three over" tweeted for six months and stopped, does not change the fact of twitter's grip on modern news dissemination.

People have said many times that twitter is rubbish, and several embraced the Pear Analytics study that "40% of twitter is pointless babble" last summer, http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-40-percent-pointless-babble/ . Well this is quite true, however about 90% of the Seattle Times is; pointless babble, crap I have no interest or use for, ADVERTISING, and poorly written drivel. It is that 10% of shiny nuggets I look for and value.
If we discuss TV, then this figure of "pointless babble" goes to 99%, most especially if we are discussing a Television news broadcast. To calculate FOX News, a cursory understanding of the principles of Six Sigma would be of help.

So if your twitter is dull it is your own lazy fault my friend. Using many services such as Tweetdeck a inquisitive industrious person can have several columns of spicy, meaty topics, divided according to the users own desires and needs.
From the Iranian Revolution to the recent resignation of the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in this day and age twitter is usually the first source, the most varied and unbiased, and the one that can be tailored to tastes you find the most palatable.

So if you most post 'pointles babble" it's OK, I can live with it,go!