photo credit: Martino!

A friend of mine recently posted to FaceBook that she doesn’t get Twitter — it’s only good for stalkers.  She followed up in her comment stream that she actually manages several Twitter accounts for business and sees value for business for SEO and marketing, but not for a regular, non-stalker person.

Since I’m a non-stalker, I promised a reply.  I like the number 5 and so do copy writers, so here are 5 reasons why Twitter isn’t lame.  And isn’t just for stalkers.  Or marketers.

Twitter is an updater

A lot of my friends are into FaceBook.  A few have remarked that I seem like I’m on FaceBook a lot.

I’m not!

I text Twitter and the Twitter updates are pulled into FaceBook as my FaceBook updates. So even when I’m running around town, running errands, or visiting new neighborhoods, Twitter allows me to share details or thoughts with friends who are on FaceBook all the time.

Services like Ping.FM make it easy to text a single update and have it populate your status on several social networks, like FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIN, and Plaxo all at the same time.

Although the default setting for Twitter is to contribute your Tweets to the public timeline, you can protect your updates so no one sees them.  Then you can use Twitter with Ping.FM or Twitter and the corresponding apps on your social networks to push a single update to all your networks at once.

Twitter is a filter & news breaker

A way I find Twitter very useful is that I follow people who have similar interests to mine.  How did I find them? I searched on key words, I read a few blogs early on about who’s interesting to read.  Things snow-balled from there.

Some of the people I follow are friends offline, some started as interesting locals I found on Twitter that I now hang out with offline.  But all the people I’ve found in various ways write or link to interesting information.  They scour the internet on their own and share the pearls, and I try to do the same.

I also follow a few news sources on Twitter, and I can see something pop up on Twitter before a full article has been written and vetted.

Twitter is the new chat

The information era has gone through several different chat technologies.

I was on DiversiDial in the 80s — when online chat was done at 300 bps, without any real color (unless phosphor screens count).  In the early 90s, AOL took over online chatting because everyone was on AOL. There were limits with rooms, just like DDial had a limit of 7 callers in the days of slow modems.

IRC popped up in there, and people have been using iChat in recent years — but this is all with a restriction on rooms or number of callers or your own buddy list.

Twitter is a new way to chat — it’s free form, it can be geo located.  With the follower and following concepts of one-way relationships (you can follow someone who doesn’t follow you), the chat stream is endlessly customizable.  But instead of customizing the chat experience by topic by entering a room, the topics of the people one follows dictates the content of the chatting more than any outside controls.

A lot of people don’t like chatting online, so Twitter is catching some of those who like the subscription concept better than the old chat systems of yore.  Some people, on the other hand, don’t like any of the chatting options online, so Twitter will not entice them.

Twitter is the new Google

Not only are people using Twitter as a personal filter like I do, but people are also leveraging the Twittersphere to find out what’s happening right now.

When American Idol was on, I searched Twitter for spoilers.  News organizations typically posted the results of any night an hour or two (or more!) after an episode aired on the East Coast.  I found out the reactions, the judge’s bottom lines, the song list, and who got voted off while it was happening by doing Twitter searches.

Twitter is the new fortune cookie

Probably my favorite part of Twitter is the weirdest.  I love short bursts of opinion or conjecture or snark.  Just like at the end of a great Chinese meal, I enjoy a little line stuck in a fortune cookie, Twitter serves up little bits of interesting fodder whenever I look at it.  Sometimes while working on something else, I need a few seconds to space out and de-focus (many creatives feel this way) and dipping into Twitter can provide a tasty little break.