Yes, Twitter is revolutionary--just not in the way you think | Webware - CNET

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Yes, Twitter is revolutionary--just not in the way you think

I thought Twitter hype had reached a fever pitch with the big Oprah appearance. Boy, was I ever wrong.

If it isn't Time magazine's " How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live " cover story, it's the widely-circulated Comedy Central clips of co-founder Biz Stone's April appearance on "The Colbert Report," or it's chairman Jack Dorsey, in New York for this week's Internet Week festivities, showing up in society-blog photos from the sidelines of a Diane von Furstenberg fashion show. (OMG!) When I was joking about Twitter's executives reaching pop-idol ubiquity , I didn't think it'd be this soon that they'd start to seem like a slightly older, slightly less puppy-faced set of Jonas Brothers. Twitter and its creators are unavoidable.

But there's something nobody's really saying about Twitter throughout all this: Not everyone is going to use this service. Far from it, in fact. Its mainstream impact could very well have nothing to do with TweetDeck, hashtags, or even the name "Twitter" itself.

The Business Insider did a nice by-the-numbers of exactly what Twitter's explosion amounts to: 60 percent of users quit after a month, ten percent account for 90 percent of all "tweets," et cetera. All these numbers point to one fact: Twitter is high-maintenance. Even if you're only using it to read the latest updates from a few publications and some of your favorite bands, you're still reading about them in short bites that flow in a relatively inefficient manner. Parsing the noise takes effort; participating in it takes even more.

Compare that to Facebook: you can create a static profile, check ...

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