Apart from waste even more of your time, of course.

Well, Twitter seems to have taken over the online world pretty comprehensively over the last few months. Don’t just take my word for it, there are even CongressTwitters. British politicians have been twits for a long time, of course, but that’s another issue. Companies such as Google have their own Twitter accounts. And all sorts of media personalities have huge followings because there are few things that people seem to like more than glimpses into the lives of the rich and famous.

Following celebrities, however, is only one aspect of what Twitter can do. You don’t have to use it to be a voyeur. It can do stuff for you as well. In fact it appears to be remarkably good at doing all sorts of things.

To start with, you can get news. I was on Twitter when Neil Gaiman made his now infamous announcement of his Newbery win. I was on Twitter when Mary Robinette Kowal announced that the Nebula final ballot was online. I was in the middle of writing this post when the news of the corrections to the Nebula ballot came up, and I immediately switched to SFAW to blog about it. This is useful to me.

More importantly, however, Twitter can get news out. You can follow discussion of specific issues on TwitterFall (such as the tweeting from Potlatch that I mentioned over the weekend). You can also find out what is currently a hot topic on Twitter by looking at the cloud map on Twitscoop. There was a glorious moment last weekend when a chance remark by Neil got “Armageddon” to appear there. I have set myself a target of getting “Hugo” and “Worldcon” visible on Twitscoop this August. Given the number of followers that Neil has, I think this is very achievable.

Remember the liveblogging of the Hugos that I did last year? Well now the technology I used for that can take input from Twitter streams. That means your webcast can have roving reporters as well. In fact it would have been perfect for the World Fantasy Awards coverage because Gigi could have tweeted the winners in rather that having to txt them to me and have me re-type them.

TwitPic is enormously useful as well. With it, and the iPhone, I can be out and about anywhere and do live reportage complete with pictures. Just imagine what you can do in terms of convention coverage with that.

And last night I discovered that Twitter can also do IM. If you find yourself in a complex conversation on Twitter you can just switch over to TinyChat and talk there.

There are things that Twitter can’t do. For example, it won’t support essays like this. But I continue to be impressed at just how much it can do, and I’m really enthusiastic about the sort of online coverage we can do for conventions using it.