Frequently, when I start discussing Twitter with people who don't use the service, I receive responses ranging from "I don't know what I'd use it for" to "The world doesn't need to know what I had for breakfast".
Matt Haughey has just posted about twittering during tragedy, as he recently underwent treatment for a brain tumor. This closing paragraph stuck out to me:
Twitter is a great tool for personal broadcast to a vast set of friends and family and it's quickly turning into a new default communication medium for the online world. It can certainly be distracting in the face of day-to-day cubicle work, but in this specific case it [...] was actually helpful at alerting friends to the accident and later informing them of the tragedy, and mirrors my own use of the service in a vaguely similar situation.
