I understand how Twitter works, what I don't understand is why anyone cares to use it?

[Nunez]

A friend told me my generation won't understand it and he's right. I am 30 years old (GenX) and technically savvy so how it works is fine, but why do it? I do not see the point of letting people know what you are up to throughout the day or how your feeling or what your thinking at all times. If you want to express yourself, become an artist or writer. Talk to someone. Pick up a phone and talk to a friend or relative. Gossip to a coworker or whatever. Please give me reasons of why you Tweet.

[Belie]

To be fair, I'm 19 and think Twitter is utterly useless and annoying. There is no "expressing yourself" to it; it's just like Facebook if all there was was constant status updates.

[Maria R]

We're living the in the most self-indulgent time in history. Everyone thinks that they are important so everyone thinks the whole world wants to know what they do when and how they do it.

[Beer Talk]

I'm 47 so way out of my league! Go down the pub if you want a load of pointless twaddle

[pokerfaced]

i don't twitter myself, but i think it's one way of advertising yourself or whatever you're selling. also i think people of this age are absolute attention whores.

[Momo]

Im 19 and not a tweet fan, unless the tweet had updates on concerts, or new items in stores or breaking news. But concerning other people talking about what breakfeast they ate that morning, I could care less.

[LexiSan]

The people who tweet the mundane things that they're doing don't "get" twitter either, but if that's what they want to use it for that's fine. But those people don't usually have many followers.

There are multiple ways to use twitter. Personally, I use it to practice my Chinese. Writing Chinese updates helps me internalize Chinese grammar and has really sped up my learning of the Chinese language.

I've seen other people use it to post quick updates of what they've eaten or the exercises they've done. I've also used it to make a quick memo when I'm out and about and only have my cellphone with me.

But the main thing about twitter is the conversation. The people that don't experience it don't get it. You know how to utilize hash tags on twitter right? If not, they're sort of like tags, to categorize your tweets. You can search various hash tags to see what other people say about that subject. The #mandarin tag is probably one of my favorites, for obvious reasons. Through this I found a lot of other mandarin learners to connect with, share tips with, etc. Someone recently started #mandarinmonday, where on Monday people who are learning mandarin post tweets in Chinese (or more tools/sites for learners) and many fluent speakers and other learners correct each other. When I participated two weeks ago it was a lot of fun and a great learning experience. This is the "conversation" I'm talking about. Sure you can follow your friends to see what they're up to, but in my opinion the whole point of it is being able to reach out to so many people at once. One of the most entertaining twitter conversations for me was during the debates for the election. It was fun participating in discussions/debates and reading other discussions/debates as the presidential/vice presidential debates were going on. And as an 18-year-old (I'm 19 now) it was very enlightening to hear so many perspectives.

#jobadvice and #college are tags I look up once in a while as well. #musicmonday is pretty popular too. Whenever I feel like finding new music I search that tag to see what people have posted.

It's also a quick way to figure out what's going on. If you go to search.twitter.com the trending topics will tell you what's currently being talked about on twitter. Some weeks ago I couldn't log into my gmail and I wasn't sure if it was just me. I used twitter to find out if it was down for everyone (and it was). That's something I probably wouldn't have been able to find anywhere else in such short notice since it was a recent problem.

Some people use it to advertise their businesses. One comcast exec actually created @comcastcares. What he does is he gets all the tweets that mention comcast and he will reply to any complaints and see if he can help them out. I thought this was brilliant since comcast has such a bad customer service rep. The great thing about it is many of the people who get help from @comcastcares will spread word around about their good experience. The twitter account is still in use, although I'm sure there's a team of people handling it now.

People have gotten hired on twitter. It's a great way to make a name for yourself and advertise your skills.

Also, it has helped greatly in charity. Some weeks ago @edufire posted a tweet:
Help eduFire improve child literacy! We'll donate $3 per retweet up to $300! - http://tr.im/iZ3j #edufire
Hundreds of people retweeted it. Now you're probably thinking, why don't they just donate the money? Is there really any need to post it on twitter? Well, edufire has a pretty big following so 100 people retweeting it was going to happen for sure. Second, retweeting it spreads the word about the charity. By spreading it around, the charity got way more money than it would have if edufire would have just donated it quietly. Think about it, one person retweets it and all of his followers see it. Some of his followers decide to retweet it and their followers see it and so on and so forth. The word spreads like wildfire. I donated $50 to the cause myself and a good chunk of other people donated money.

Regardless, twitter is not for everyone. However, posting mundane updates is certainly not it's only function or even the best part about it. It's more than just facebook status updates, it really is an information highway.

This was a lot longer than I intended it to be, but I hope that shed some light. Also, here's a great article:
http://mashable.com/2009/04/10/extraordi...r-updates/
My personal favorites are 4-8. :]