I don’t mind people twittering about anything, but I’ve had to become a bit picky about who I follow. It comes down to who you ‘add’ as friends, how many friends you add and whether you ‘turn them on’ or not. A number of folk I ‘follow’ are not turned on meaning, whenever I’m switched to mobile or IM I don’t receive their updates. The folks I might want to converse with are always switched on.

It’s a service that you do need to tweak a little bit to get something out of, but I have found it genuinely useful in a number of situations enough to make me believe in it’s fundamental potential to improve and speed up the conversation. Without doubt, it’s one to watch.

That said – I’m not sure they’ve got that set up quite right in the UK, because I think it should be more expensive than it is, and they appear to be using a normal phone number.

From what I can work out, text messaging in the USA works differently (anyone confirm?): just as you pay to receive calls on your cellular, you also pay to receive texts. Or, of course, they come off your bundle.

This has terrific possibilities with texting; since companies that want to try new and interesting things with texts don’t have to charge at least 10p for the privilege (and charge a sceptical user for stuff before they know whether the service is any good). From a corporate point of view, I wish this model existed in the UK. (From a consumer point of view, I’ve mixed thoughts.)

But I agree, I see absolutely no business model with Twitter; and the texting services they offer will result in, at least, a 5p charge every single text they send in the UK.

Twitter’s fun, but increasingly unreliable, slow, inaccessible. It’s testing some folk’s patience.