Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Kent Newsome hits the nail on the head:

Nobody, and I mean N-O-B-O-D-Y, in the real business world has the slightest idea what Twitter is, and if you tried to tell them, they wouldn't be the slightest bit interested. Oh, unless they were in some corporate IT department- they'd be interested then, but only because they'd have to remember to block Twitter along with the free email and porn sites. And even if they didn't, heavy use of Twitter at work would be about the same as heavy eBay use. Not a career enhancing move.

I live in Waterloo, Canada, in Canada's Technology Triangle, and winner of the Intelligent City award. Yet if I mention Twitter (or heaven forbid Jaiku of something else like that) I get blank stares even from diehard technology folks. The most frequent response is "why would you want to tell people everything you are doing?" followed by "why would someone care what you are doing?".

Business people would be looking for the business reason to do something like this. You could argue for "increase business communication" but seriously that's a bit of a thin argument unless you are somebody like a startup where time is extremely critical and you want to capture every interjection.

Twitter is actually a lot like standing on the street corner and yelling at passersby.Some may choose to stop and listen, while many will walk on by and ignore you. And of the ones who stop, you may choose to listen to some and ignore others. That isn't communication.

While no perfect solution, at least blogging allows me to comment on your thoughts (if you allow comments) or building on them through trackbacks.Blogging also encapsulates it's own history which I can generally search to find nuggets. Tweets, by nature of their short messages, would likely return more hits but less useful information, and probably few links to other sources of information.

Blogging has actually helped me to meet people and to forge relationships with them. I just can't see that happening through Twitter. It seems more like a tool to extend and maintain existing relationships. And Facebook is kind of nice, but I just can't be bothered to deal with an increasing backlog of Vampire, Zombie, Drink requests and the like. It isn't really a communication medium; it is becoming the equivalent of forwarded jokes via email.