Twitter is a popular microblogging platform at the moment.
Many users (or potential users) of the service are confused as to how to use it.
Twitter is presented as a means for answering the question "what are you doing?" but is really primarily a tool for real-time communication and search.
The most effective users of Twitter are doing these things:
Posting regularly.
Posting meaningful comments.
Linking to other web resources.
Participating in conversations pertaining to topics of personal interest.
The most ineffective (and frustrated) users of Twitter are doing these things:
Registering without a clear intention for using the service.
Posting meaningless content.
Following too few users or too many users.
Becoming distracted by Twitter when work should be accomplished.
Treating Twitter as a one-way advertising platform.
Using the default web interface.
The trends of real-time search and microblogging are likely to remain important for a long time, though individual services such as Twitter could quickly disappear.
The Twitter search provides an opportunity to find out what web users around the world are saying about a particular topic at any point in time.
Twitter may be a fad, but real-time search is growing in importance.
One question remains to be answered: will Twitter ever make money? It is amazing that acquiring excessive venture capital and building a service of millions of free accounts without any planned revenue stream is considered a viable web startup plan.
Chris Pearson (developer of Thesis for Wordpress) recently shared some interesting thoughts on Twitter and the web in general: