Twitter can be most useful to libraries but as of this posting was not in use in my neck of the woods.

Veteran newspersons can see at a glance that twitter is no more trivial or stupid than a daily newspaper's multi-story offset press. Research (.pdf) and experience both suggest that twitter fulfills the news-telling function of the old newswires whose machines once yammered away in newsrooms, spooling out long, wide ribbons of readable copy inked on yellow pulp paper. And serves interactive social needs the old newswires could never address.

Twitter news is often personal, and that is a virtue, not the deteriment some say it is.

The flow of information remains strikingly snoptic, sometimes rising to the literary level of poetry.

When scanned in volume, tweets (140-character-or-less messages) have the staccato feel of the bygone API and UPI news feeds read at a deadline sprint, and as a source of news often move at a deadline sprint.

Very much unlike the old newswires, twitter is available to anyone who can connect to the service, rather than affordable only by a few enterprises, and then only for tightly constrained purposes.

Amid this digital-age news feed for the rest of us, the personal nature of the most of tweets is as important as the expertise-rich information space twitter engenders.

Catastrophe public and personal alike can endow those frequent-enough-to help, follow-you-anywhere tweets from friends with value that exceeds my ability to express it.

That value is real, almost tangible and not merely a vague, tactile sense of community.

Twitter's shaved-to-the-features-bone interface helps make it stunningly easy for anyone to use.

All you really need is a means of connection -- usually a cellphone or a computer -- with a means of delivering output and a means of driving keystrokes.

Twitter is, after all, designed to be used by anyone from anywhere. Staying in touch with your friends and associates no matter where you are, and informed, is the beating heart of it, and that imposes a powerful simplifying discipline on the design and implementation decisions.

Twitter is not by nature a play space. It is a social-networking/information-dissemination service and platform for people who both need one and are serious and the use of their time and energy. Although it readily supports connections to play spaces, those spaces are a different business, and twitter is thus far apparently not at all confused about the business it is in.

The developers understand quite well, for example, that they're offering a platform for other development as well as a service.

The Application Programmer's Interface (API) is available, usable and spawning interesting applications like twitterverse, Terraminds search and a long list of others.

Content published on twitter remains the property of the creator.

If twitter disappeared tomorrow, many of us would quickly set about to re-create it. Meanwhile, one of my preoccupations is developing applications based on the platform and associated concepts.

I think they'll be around a while, and useful.