<p>In my region (Bay Area) for a while there seemed to be a manufactured saturation in which every time you turned around, media people were referencing Twitter. It wasn’t normal. (Perhaps part of their “scaling up quickly.”) After that initial push, I’m sure it did grow organically, as people found uses for it, and word radiated out…</p>
<p>I love to Google everything I need to know, very technical work related question, any news, any local news, I cannot imagine that I would not find what I am looking for at the time I am looking for it. It does not happen very often at all. Too much info is like not having it at all, got to sort it out and it is wasting of time IMO. But others might have much wider interests, so I can see that they love to be bombarded with various data all day long. I simply do not have any memory to retain most of it, so it does not make any sense in my case. 15 min. of news is plenty, the rest is just a repeatition. When somebody is sharing any news with me, I already know them…from the radio while driving to and from work, that is all I can retain anyway, more gets very efficiently purged, gone with the wind…</p>
<p>I was asking the same question about a yr ago - what twitter is REALLY useful for is news updates that haven’t been yet written as stories eg Hurricane Sandy - I was not able to load pages of my township’s website about emergency services or get any info from Weather Channel once our power went out, it was really great to be following my county’s OEM. We didn’t have TV or good cell service even, but twitter could still load even though slowly. I also “follow” a few local news orgs, our public school system. </p>
<p>Hash tags (#blablabla) are ways to group posts, so someone mentioned before #njgas and #njopen are currently ways for me to find if there are gas stations or supermarkets, diners, open in my area. Of course, you are limited to knowing from who is posting on twitter right, but someone can tweet “Costco Wharton has gas - short lines” at 2 am and I can get there. Noone on the news is going to help me with that.</p>
<p>Other than that, twitter can be another form of mild amusement and a way for celebrities/politicians/public figures to seem like they are talking to their fans or followers.</p>
<p>I follow Anderson Cooper. Reading his tweets as he is in Gaza is an example of the impact a tweet can have on your understanding of news - literally, seeing pictures and hearing words as they happen.</p>
<p>How would I have known Derek Dooley (football coach at TN) was fired before he actually WAS???</p>
<p>I follow Dolan the Duck (actuallyamDolan). Sheer nonsense, acquired taste. If you never saw the Scandinavian cartoon, you won’t get it.</p>