A friend of mine works at one of the largest online ad networks, and thus has a pretty keen eye into how money moves around the web when it comes to monetizing content creation. Some interesting thoughts on the Twitter hype:
I definitely agree with the "why bother" statement because most updates can be useless to most people, but there are also a lot of benefits of sharing information.
Especially for these companies who can get insight into their consumers without hiring market research companies to survey people. Or for publishers/bloggers to find news to share or share news with their readers...Twitter can be a great tool to stay connected. It's a great tool for celebrities to stay in touch with fans, etc...
I think that everyone jumps on the bandwagon when something is new. Eventually most people with drop out and the ones left will refine the tool to perfect it. The same thing happened when blog technology first came out. It was cool to have a personal blog, but these days it's more refined. Bloggers are full fledged editorial sites that are creating content with a loyal readership reading their material, and they have figured out a way to monetize it.
So that's both good news, and in some ways bad news, for Twitter.
The good - it's not going anywhere, despite what detractors might say.
The bad - if Twitter isn't really destined to become the future of human communication, will it have enough uptake to support itself long term? Especially when it doesn't have the benefit of pageviews to support advertising, or the universality of something like Skype to justify a subscriber model?
Perhaps if it can replace SMS there is hope, but that's a big "if". If they could pull it off, they would be to SMS what Skype is to voice.
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