1. Short posts
People only have 140 characters to say what they want to say - someone's day was bad, that's probably as much as you'll hear about it. Someone did something cool, you'll probably hear what they did without the life-story of where they went, how they got there, who they bumped into, etc. Short and to the point.
2. Customer Service
Where else can you send a wish/request/complaint into the world and get a response back within 24 hours:
@hypn wishes there was a cheaper way to ship stuff from HongKong to ZA - already tried HongKong Post, DHL and UPS. Any other suggestions? :| 11:20 PM Apr 19th via web
@FedExEmily @hypn Good Morning. Would you like for a representative to contact you on rates from Hong Kong to ZA? about 20 hours ago via web
As it turns out I no longer need to ship stuff from Hong Kong to South Africa, but think about that for a second... a company picked up on a need I had "tweeted" - even though it didn't mention them - and contacted me to find me a solution. That's brilliant marketing if you ask me.
There was also an incident recently where I downloaded Nokia OVI Maps, which is meant to be "free" , which kept telling me that my license had expired. I send out a "tweet" to @Nokia complaining about this, and they got a local PR consultant to contact me to resolve the issue.
No phone calls, no being on hold, not menu prompts to try and get through to get to an operator, no have to explain your problem over and over again... you tweet, and (good) companies respond. Now if only my bank had a @Rbjacobs (from FNB) doing what he does... I'm opening an account with FNB in the next month or two. Customer service has evolved, has your business's?
3. News
Why bother paging through your morning paper, or having to scroll through pages of ads and useless information to find the day's news, when you could just get it through Twitter - often the news breaks there before it's picked up by the major news sites (granted, it might be a bit inaccurate if not completely false). A lot of the bigger news sites even post the headlines on Twitter, eg: BBC's Breaking News.
There's also "trending topics", a great way to find out what people are talking about around the world. When 9/11 happened a friend of mine was in an "IRC channel" (chat room) with someone in the military or something, who was relaying information to them as stuff was happening. I'd imagine if Twitter had been around then, people would've been "tweeting" from inside the buildings - far more information than a reporter would ever be able to get - and who knows how valuable that information could be in saving people or knowing what risks still exist.
4. Finding people
By searching for a few keywords you can easily find like minded people, or even people stuck in a situation - for example, at the time of writing this the volcano in Iceland has tourists around the world stranded... Twitter's advanced search page lets you limit search results to a certain distance from you, so you could (in theory) quite easily find people stranded at your nearest airport, in need of accommodation... and hopefully help them out :)
5. Synchronizing to Facebook (and Google Buzz)
There's a Facebook app called "Selective Tweets" which is able to read in your "tweets" on Twitter that have a keyword (default is "#fb") and set them as your Facebook status. There is also an official (I believe) Twitter app for Facebook that "tweets" your Facebook statuses... personally I prefer to have Twitter update to Facebook. There's also Google Buzz, which I don't really use cough twitter clone *cough, that's able to "buzz"(?) your "tweets" from Twitter - though it tends to be somewhat delayed. Just one post to update 3 "social networks" - doesn't get much easier than that :)