I had a Twitter account laying dormant for quite awhile because for the life of me, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to "microblog". it wasn't until a month ago, with all the hype that Twitter has been getting lately, when I decided I needed to revisit this thing.

Just 140 words to say something? I mean, who really cares that you're eating a taco at El Torito at 11:49am in Hollywood?

As it turns out, a lot of people are using Twitter to post links to articles they found on some other website. About 90% of these links are to articles that most of us are already aware of having read them elsewhere, either on the front page of Yahoo, in the newspaper, heard on the radio, saw on television, or heard from a co-worker. But yet people feel compelled to post the links there anyways.

Is that Twitter is used for? Posting links to articles on other websites?

Not always. Sometimes people talk about the tacos they're eating at El Torito.

"Hey everyone, I uploaded a photo of me holding a bloody mary at a bar in Santa Fe, with a cute looking asian chick."

The content on Twitter is still useless.

Admittedly, I'm guilty of posting the same crap on Twitter. But then again, it's more like that old adage, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do".

Does anyone use Twitter to say something worthwhile? Does anyone use Twitter to say something constructive? Does anyone actually use their Twitter account to do something original?

It would be cool to find someone who tweets a project step by step. If you love to write haiku, it might be cool to tweet a new haiku of yours each morning, provided it can fit into 140 characters. But no one is using Twitter for something cool. They're just posting links to headlines we've already seen, or telling us how delicious that taco was.

Just a week ago, I took a motorcycle camping trip with some friends to Utah and back. I tried to tweet the whole thing. First, I posted an article on my Motorcycle Philosophy blog, telling people that I was going to tweet the trip, and gave them the address. A handful of people visited my Twitter feed to follow it along.

But as it turned out, it's not all that easy to do. First, you have to have a handheld device, such as a Blackberry or an iPhone. That is, you can't really carry a laptop on a motorcycle camping trip. Well ok, I guess you can do that, but there's not much room left for a laptop on a motorcycle after it's been loaded down with camping gear. But second, you can't really pick up network access if you travel deep into the outback of rural America.

But that was my one attempt at trying to create interesting content on Twitter.

Considering there are so many people using Twitter, there's got to be something more constructive, productive, or useful that it can be used for. And don't tell me that twittering can boost the profitability of your business. No one has tweeted their business to the tune of higher profits. Twitter is still just a respository of mindless banter.  ✓