If Twitter ceased to exist, would it really matter?<p>That is the fundamental problem with it. The world gets by perfectly fine without Twitter (and all those that &#x27;tweet&#x27;). It is not a communication medium of record in the way that email is. I do not ask people &#x27;did you get my tweet?&#x27; in the way I might ask people if they got my email. I never say &#x27;I will tweet it to you&#x27; in the way I might text&#x2F;skype&#x2F;email someone.<p>I know some of my colleagues and family members say great things about Twitter, but these guys commute and Twitter is just another thing they read on the journey. I actually have no clue what my sister&#x27;s Twitter handle is, I have no idea what any of my current colleagues Twitter handles are either. It simply has never occurred to me that I should ask any of them how to follow them on Twitter. I don&#x27;t care and neither do they.<p>Twitter also fails the &#x27;other people&#x27;s screens test&#x27;. What is this? Well, walk through a large enough office at lunch time and see what NORMAL people have on their screens whilst working and whilst on lunch. Nobody is reading Twitter because they have to as part of what their job or out of choice in the few moments they have of &#x27;free time&#x27;. The recently slagged off LinkedIn and the oft-criticised Facebook do pretty well on the &#x27;other people&#x27;s screens test&#x27; even if it is only the HR department that do LinkedIn. Twitter isn&#x27;t even worth blocking from corporate IT networks!!!<p>I feel that with Twitter some people have bought into the hype and personally invested time and effort into believing that hype, for them to say it is useless is not going to happen. Yes it does allow me to have a window in on the programming community I am part of, however, one &#x27;vital&#x27; news story feed in my micro-world-of-programming stopped and life went on for me, despite not having Twitter to brief me of what I thought were important developments. RSS fulfilled this requirement beforehand, life went on when RSS stopped and life will go on when this stupid Twitter thing stops, which I hope will happen sooner rather than later. Really it is like CB radio of the 1970&#x27;s.