It takes a while to find a use. Originally, I thought it was just the status feature of Facebook for people over 35, so I was wondering why everyone was so exc

It takes a while to find a use. Originally, I thought it was just the status feature of Facebook for people over 35, so I was wondering why everyone was so excited about a limited feature set. I've definitely come around. I don't think everyone uses it the same way, but I'll rhyme off a few uses I've found. 1 - Replacement for RSS. Follow the blogs you do on RSS and get push notifications of updates. Authors sometimes have smaller things to say than a blog post requires, so the feed acts as an added feature. 2 - Follow the doings of "niche celebrities" like Eric Reis and PG. They give advice and comment on recent events, but aren't really popular in the mainstream sense. 3 - Follow more general celebrities. It gives people you are a fan of a direct line to you independent of traditional media outlets. Think Conan when he was without a network, and Kevin Smith is doing some interesting things as well. Sure, Kim Kardashian has a huge following which she uses to hock products, but there is a massive audience who wants precisely that. 4 - Comedy feeds. I find when comedians have only 140 characters, the constraint makes the jokes more punchy. (plug: my traction deficient app http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com http://laughlitmus.feedladder.com is trying to capitalize on this; viral loops are a bitch) 5 - Real time events. You'll hear about an earthquake on trending topics before any media outlet. 6 - Following privacy paranoid real life friends. Twitter has a dead simple privacy model. Either people can publicly see your feed, or they have to approve you. Some people I know got fed up with the Facebook privacy shell game and switch to Twitter for this. 7 - Connecting with a loosely coupled community. For those of us not in the valley, finding fellow hackers can be troublesome, and when you do, you don't really need a heavy connection, but following each other on twitter is a nice lightweight way to see if the local tech event is going to be hacker or muggle heavy. 8 - Location based chat for conferences. Hashtags allow for people to mark a discussion about anything, and a lot of meetups will tell you the recommended hashtag so you can see what people are discussing in a specific place. I hate is the whole "Twitter is just people talking about what they had for breakfast" complaint, it really just meant you are following boring people. There actually exist a non-trivial set of people I know whom I am friends with on Facebook (and real life) but wouldn't follow on twitter because they're tweeting about stuff I have no interest in.