If I was still a twiterholic I would be gushing about how cute my daughter is and the fact she is still asleep (normally she would wake up an hour and a half ago)

My question is, how is that relevant in a social media context?  Some people follow experts to hear relevant stuff, and get an insight how the person works.  All they would get from that contribution is, oh, he thinks his daughter is cute - like all other dads in existence.

Readers would get a feeling for me being a family man, but in the scheme of things, if I was another reader, and could delete posts that didn’t interest me, I’d be deleting it straight away.  irrelevant, not what I am looking for.

It’s this mix of personal and professional which social media encourages that is making things difficult.  If you only use twitter professionally, people will likely stop following you because you will seem to be a spammer.  If you get to personal in your tweets, your serious opinion will probably be discounted.

But after all that, when I think twitter really shines is when you are mobile at an event you know many other twitter users will be at.  Has anyone seen the xxxx stand?  I’ll be in the bar in 5 minutes taking questions.  I’ve just broken my earphones, anyone got a spare?

It’s like a bulletin board in your pocket.

The other extremely useful function I think twitter has is in it’s spread of news.  If you want to keep track of particular news, there are more than enough voyers who are contributing their thoughts to it in the twitterverse, and just one of them will have the exact information the media need for a exclusive.  Sites like twitterfall will become deeply embedded in most newsrooms with multiple instances being used to track details on major news items.