&gt; Twitter has turned into a place where famous people and news organizations broadcast text. That’s it.<p>It has? I don&#x27;t follow any news organizations or famous people. Well, a couple of Hugo-winning authors. But than&#x27;s not like Beiber famous. And my timeline is a vibrant place full of friends talking with each other. It&#x27;s like an IRC channel where <i>I</i> get to decide who&#x27;s there. And it works great for that.<p>&gt; Second–and this one is obvious to almost everyone–Twitter needs to focus on realtime events. When I open Twitter during a major debate in the US, or when a bomb has exploded in Bangkok, there should be a huge fucking banner at the top that says “follow this breaking event.”<p>Whenever there is a major thing going on my timeline will tell me about it. Because my friends will be retweeting stuff, or tweeting news articles they saw about whatever the thing is elsewhere. I know when there are conventions going on. I know when riots are happening. I know when there is a videogame speedrun charity marathon happening. Well, I used to until I decided to preemptively block the hashtags for those. I know when my friends are musing about their gardens, or their resumes, or their angst about their core skills. I even know when some of my friends are feeling frisky if they&#x27;ve trusted me with access to their private accounts where they occasionally post half-naked selfies. And in the middle of that I get all these weird blips of surreality from various art project bots I follow. I don&#x27;t need a &quot;huge fucking banner&quot; telling me to follow a breaking event, because my friends will be talking about it.<p>When I have a problem with some software or some corporation, if I use their @name while bitching about the problem there is a pretty decent they will reply and help fix it.<p>Yeah, every kid who tweets at Beiber isn&#x27;t going to get a reply. Duh? Would they expect a reply on other social media? Does Beiber even run his own account? There&#x27;s a lot of celebrities with mostly-dormant accounts run by their social media specialists, and they&#x27;re boring as fuck because they&#x27;re not really there. But a lot of people who are famous, but not Mega Corporate Media Distribution Famous, actually do run their own twitters.<p>Who the hell is Dustin following here? Does he actually have any friends who use Twitter as his primary mode of communication? Are all his friends on Facebook or G+ or something else instead? Because it sure sounds like he&#x27;s not using Twitter anywhere near the way I use it.