Dennis "AccMan" Howlett (on Twitter):

I must be one of the few people who doesn’t get Twitter, the SMS service that delivers short messages to either a mobile phone and/or over the web. According to the FT (sorry - paywall):

Warning against the temptation to reject Twitter as a flash in the pan, Mr Schwartz (CEO Sun Microsystems) added: “YouTube was funny until it was worth $1.65bn (£840m) to someone,” a reference to Google’s purchase of the company last year.

[...] But then James Governor tells an interesting anecdote:

At about 11:30 this morning I found out on Twitter that Shai Agassi had resigned from SAP, to spend more time with his sustainable energy…I found out through Twitter, through some of the sharpest minds in SAP’s dev ecosystem (Mat, Ed). Which is cool.

Hmm…the news broke in the Wall Street Journal at: 1.11pm according to email registered at my inbox around the same equivalent time as James. If I did not have access to my computer then Twitter would have been useful in that regard. But given there is a 140 character limit to Twitter messages, it’s not as though I could have done much useful with the message anyway.

140 characters may be an example of the power of constraints -- what you send really has to mean it! If it was longer, you'd be reading it on your computer anyway.

What is the intersection between people who do/would use Twitter and those interested in/needing time sensitive financial information? It seems the the first group consists of those with "a fair amount of time on their hands and don't mind being interrupted" and the second group those with "little free time and busy".

Perhaps there'll be business models popping up providing services over Twitter. But that seems risky, doesn't it? More likely they'd just clone it.