rebecca's pocket

I think it's interesting that you immediately went to mentioning whether Twitter is "useful". From what I know of similar services in, say, Korea, that hasn't even arisen as an issue. Or, as I think Ev said about the question, ice cream isn't that useful, either.

Well, ice cream tastes good and it's refreshing on a hot day. Getting a constant stream of ephemera from the people I know doesn't sound fun to me, it sounds distracting, and then annoying, and then—pretty quickly—crazy-making.

But then I have a public AIM account that I use only when I need to ask someone a question, and I only use my cell phone to make calls—I leave it off the rest of the time.

So intrusions aren't really my thing.

One of the current features of Twitter that I really like is that it works completely inconsistently via IM. So, it feels very random to me. And, I follow only a handful of people in whom I trust that their occasional, random bits of blah-blah will be notably amusing.

In this sense, to me, Twitter functions like a medium of a collaborative work of poetry that's built through random, spontaneous fragments of typing.

I also keep my IM client configured such that I only am aware of the Twitter chat window when I close other things that I am working on, e.g., when I am inbetween doing something useful.