When I joke that I’m over Twitter, what I really mean is that my initial passion/overusage has dwindled since I first started using it back in 2007 with various pseudonyms. Back then I felt like an early adopter (sure, Twitter was launched in 2006, but c’mon, virtually nobody used it for the first year). Now every local mom and pop is trying to encourage you to follow them on Twitter, as if they had any idea why they’d want you to do that (for those interested, The Onion brilliantly skewers this practice)

So what value do I see in Twitter? Here’s a cool example that happened yesterday.

I was at my computer launching a website I’d built for a client, and wondering “why in the world does WordPress not allow you to export widget and theme configurations, like it does with content (via XML)?” I tried Googling it, but couldn’t find a solution or answer to my question. So then I went to Twitter and asked a couple WordPress savvy colleagues. When they didn’t have any answers, I thought “hey – might as well go straight to the top.” So I sent an @ to Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress. And you know what? He hit me back with a reply:

My initial reaction was excited that the founding developer of WordPress thinks I have a good idea about the development of WordPress, but also a little bummed that I probably couldn’t patch it on my own.

But more to the point: What are the odds that I could reach Matt on the phone? Think I could you schedule him to meet me for lunch? This guy is a jet-setter–and super busy. Yet with Twitter I can reach him, create a dialogue and get meaningful feedback. And I’d have the same odds if I were a kid at an internet cafe in inner Mongolia. Pretty cool, if you ask me.