Making friends and influencing people
Networking
There is potential real value in Twitter as a networking tool. If two people subscribe to each other's accounts they can direct message each other and it can be a genuine way of growing your contacts list. Again, it has this in common with existing Web 2.0 services like Linked In.
Sales/marketing
Any form of communication is going to appeal to marketing professionals, whose job it is to convey a message to the outside world. You're even getting Twitter specific sales promotions from companies like Dell and this sort of thing is bound become more widespread.
Media
Sites like HEXUS.channel can use software like Twitterfeed to automatically tweet links to stories as soon as they're published and acquire readership they might not otherwise have.
Realtime news
Professional journalists, bloggers and the general public can offer real-time updates on events as they witness them. There is already speculation that this will replace mainstream media but there is still the need to be monitoring your twitter feed in order to receive this news and, of course, each bulletin can only be 140 characters long.
Me too
People who've heard about this hot new thing and want to see what it's all about. There are also people like celeb comedian David Mitchell, who are forced onto Twitter to compete with people pretending to be them. You can read about that in his piece in The Guardian yesterday.
Also published in The Guardian this morning is a piece by devoted tweeter Jemima Kiss, in which she reveals what a bunch of her followers give as their reasons for using Twitter.
