My staff told me during a meeting the other day that blogger Vinnie Mirchandani was told by a reader that he "sucks" because he's not on Twitter, which lead Mr. Mirchandani to detail exactly why he does not Twitter.

I wish that my own resistance to / bewilderment about Twitter was the only reason someone could accuse me of "sucking."

However, I certainly share Mirchandani's belief that the platform, as it exists today, is mostly about "noise." Candidly, as an editor at a B2B publisher, that creates something of a quandary for me, since it's part of our mission to cut through "noise" and get to the substance of things. High-sounding, I know, but that's what we shoot for.

But, if working on the Internet will teach you anything, it's that people (a.k.a., your customers) do what they want, by and large, and it behooves you to play along as far as you can. And a lot of folks like Twitter. We maintain a Twitter profile of our own, of course, as do many of our bloggers, including the eternally edgy Loraine Lawson. So we clearly understand that if readers want to consume infomation this way, we need to be Tweeting to them.

I continue to wonder, however, how a business can use Twitter internally, as they have learned to use consumer-originated tech like IM and those old-school "macro" blogs that can publish more than two sentences at once.

I spent 15 minutes today discussing Twitter with Rose Booth, one of our crack marketers here at IT Business Edge and a Twitter user herself. And -- by sheer coincidence, I swear -- Paul Mah posted today on possible business applications of text messages.

All of which simply served to confirm my original assessment of Twitter -- it's a one-to-many text messaging service.

My Web-based Twitter home page looks an awful lot like a Google Reader page to me. Actually, I've found that it often looks like this:

But you know that already.

Anyway, building a Twitter follow list is perhaps a tad easier than adding feeds to an RSS reader, but that's only because Twitter is essentially a monopoly in the micro-blogging space; it has all the data. When other platforms make a dent in the market -- and they most likely will -- users will want to manage all this micro-info in one place.

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