(1) Describing Twitter as the “always available ‘cocktail party’ conversation …”

More correctly, when there actually are such 2-way conversations going on – and in my own relatively short time (5 months in 2 former accounts) with the application, these are rare – the typical Twitter experience resembles tuning in to only ONE side of such a conversation. Sure our timelines might contain other users’ “@ replies” but we seldom are given the contextual thread. Blame the character limit? Anyways, if a user wants to properly converse with another over the Internet couldn’t they more efficiently use a different platform – one that’s more threaded, personal and private? (chat, Skype, even email!)

(2) That Twitter makes it “easy to catch up with your ‘followers’ anywhere,” etc.

In fact it’s not your followers you catch up on, it’s they who catch u’p on you. While the core members of ‘followers’ and ‘the followed’ may be the same individuals, in many cases they are not. Remember each tweet you make appears only in the timeline of each follower. An interesting study of user behavior would be determining the % of users whose dominant preference is to tweet (active users) versus those whose preference is to read tweets (passive users).

One thing that is outside the scope of your article, but that I have a big gripe with, is the almost universal lemming-like mindless obsession to acquire Twitter followers (by fair means or foul). I use the term lemmings deliberately because this practice sure is a killer strategy. Because of this I recently ceased twittering under one of my accounts which had “organically” achieved a relatively small (1.5K) number of followers. The noise from the high % of useless tweets was a real put off in trying to sift out any occasional gems in my timeline. My new approach, and one that’s working a treat, is to be careful who you follow, be very careful!