In that sense, very little is new. But there are significant differences between Twitter and Email or SMS. More below…
> As I said before, I have nothing against this form of communication
> per se - it has certain uses just as SMS does, albeit its
> functionality is limited vis a vis that of email. What I dislike is
> the information glut that it creates, which requires extra time and
> effort to extract something useful out of it. <…>
>
> Stated differently, this form of communication brings us closer to the
> Jorge Louis Borges' concept of the "Library of Babel"
> http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jatill/175/libraryf.htm - a place where
> the problem is not the availability of information but the ease of its
> retrieval.
To me, one big value of Twitter or similar services (Reddit if that’s your persuasion) is that in some manner they “curate” (hate that word usage) the “fire hose” (hate that one too). The glut is not caused by Twitter. It’s caused by global connectivity and the ease with which information can be published (on blogs, so on).
IMHO you are confusing the tool/service with the common perception of its use… that perception being that people use Twitter to broadcast their mundane activities to nobody in particular. You can do that on Twitter just as you can on email (except Twitter is nice in that you can’t bother someone without their opting in), but that’s hardly what it is used for. I follow friends/fellow-travellers like Michael Pollak and Doug because they send good material my way. I follow a couple of techies because they post links to the latest goings on in the tech world. I follow Reuters, NPR News and a couple of other news sources to get the headlines. I could do the latter using RSS. I could encourage friends to send me email instead of tweeting. Etc. Or I could just follow them on Twitter.
—ravi