It seems everyone is talking about Twitter lately – What is Twitter? How will Twitter make money? What will happen to Twitter once it goes mainstream? Twitter, Twitter, Twitter… – so I’m going to go ahead and jump on the bandwagon and add my own two cents.

My friend Henriette just wrote a great post on her blog explaining the differences between Facebook and Twitter. Her post got me thinking, because it was only two weeks ago that I attempted to explain to my mom what Twitter was, and I found I had a hard time doing so. I KNEW what Twitter was, but I couldn’t explain it very well, especially to someone who is not as technically inclined.

Henriette nailed it right on the head when she said,

“You can explore people on Facebook. You can explore people on Twitter. But where Facebook is great to find out a lot of stuff about people based on a context, Twitter is great at exploring people based on conversation and interactions.”

A lot of people think Twitter is stupid (ie, my coworkers), and to give them credit, much of the stuff that is posted IS pointless (many of my own tweets included). However, what makes Twitter great isn’t the individual tweets a person makes, but the collective of tweets and the interactions you are able to make with complete strangers (and companies). As I tried explaining to my mom, “It’s like texting, chat rooms, and message boards combined.” Not a very great explanation, but it worked for her.

I also enjoy Twitter because it provides real time media reporting and channels. I knew about the plane crash in the Hudson river and Lance Armstrong’s recent injury hours before my coworkers read it on CNN. At SXSW, I was able to see which parties were the ones to be at, could read comments and questions regarding a particular pane, and was able to interact with other people in line for Diggnation – in real time.

How will Twitter make money? I don’t know. Gary Vaynerchuk posted a great video on his theory, and Jason Calacanis posted an interesting mockup of his idea. I would also imagine Twitter also has massive amounts of data relating to any one subject, and could pull that data and present it in a clean and concise manner to a company that wants to know what people think of their brand (although that company could easily do it themselves with the search feature, but the companies who don’t know how to use Twitter may be willing to pay).

Personally, I love Twitter. I do recognize that what I tweet about – and what many others tweet about – is pointless, but there’s also something beautiful in the simple and mundane part of every day life. I know that no one cares what I ate for breakfast, and saying so will not affect anyone else’s life in any particular way (except possibly others who are also passionate about breakfast burritos!). But at the end of the day, I feel apart of something. The fact that people care enough about what I have to say (no matter how mundane) to follow me is amazing, and makes me feel like I have a voice on this big thing we call the internet.

Follow me on Twitter! :)