A colleague described Twitter as "marketing people yelling at other marketing people". I see his point, but I find that in my local community, Twitter serves a purpose. There are frequent conversations between local individuals interested in urban renewal in my city, which often include city councillors, officials in various capacities, journalists, and so on. So this is interesting and quite valuable.

But there's no question there's a huge amount of noise. And I question whether anyone who follows more than 300 or 400 people is actually reading much at all in their stream.