Stephen Chapman asked in a comment earlier:

As you are obviously an educated guy – can you explain Twitter to me. I just dont get it!

I have no interest in knowing what my friends are doing all day (I have seen such entries as “having a coffee”, “having another coffee”, “the sandwich lady is near to my desk” etc).

And I doubt anyone wants to read about my whole day!

What am I missing!???

http://thestateofthenationuk.blogspot.com/

I don’t get what there is to get. Some other people ask “why read/write blogs?” – it’s more or less the same, but on a slightly different scale, and plenty of people don’t understand that either.

If you are reading twitters of people who are dull enough to narrate the boring minutiae of their lives, then you are reading the wrong people, as there are many more fascinating twitterers out there. In the very same way there are people who write interesting blogs and there are people who don’t, and each has their opinion about who is worth reading and who isn’t.

I was first interested in Twitter because I think it might be a useful way for elected politicians to communicate with constituents – and indeed, a number of MPs and councillors now do just that.

However, although I am a councillor who twitters, I don’t do it as a campaigning way of communicating with residents. In the same way, this is a personal blog about a person who happens to be a councillor, rather than a councillor blog. Not everyone gets that either.

Since starting to use it, it’s increased in size and the number of people who use it. It’s now a useful resource that a number of my friends are using. I can get occasional updates from people I care about the other side of the planet and I’m following enough witty people to find interesting things to read every time I log on.

The most important thing about Twitter is the way it plays well with hundreds of other web services in ways that develop on a daily basis. So Twitter can update my Facebook status, and my blog can archive them. Postcrossing can update Twitter when I send a card (jury’s still out on the benefits of that, to be honest). And there are new and interesting ways of slicing twitter feeds every day, so I think it’s safe to say that Twitter will continue to be interesting in the new year.

I entirely understand that not everyone gets it, so, thanks to the magic of WordPress, if you want to read this blog without reading the Tweets, you can do that using this link (which is also available as a feed).