As a regular Twitter user I’ve often wished  that more of my friends would use it. It’s great to have access to the thoughts (and, occasionally, attention) of lots of interesting people in the Twitter-sphere but sometimes I want my friends to be tweeting their thoughts too. Why can’t they see  the value in it?

Converting people to Twitter can be a slow process as unlike Facebook there’s no immediate return on your investment. You can’t look at friends’ drunken photos, play Scrabble against them or throw a sheep at them; it’s just 140-character bursts of text. Some people will never see the appeal, but it’s always good when you manage to change someone’s perspective on Twitter.

Ewan MacLeod, editor of Mobile Industry Review, posted an acerbic rant about Twitter last week, stating that there was far too much irrelevant nonsense being tweeted and that the amount of ‘noise’ put him off using the service. He then asked me, as a heavy user of Twitter, to write up my thoughts about the  service and to point out what he  might have missed  about it. I was happy to oblige and on Saturday morning I sat down to write about 500 words or so in support of my beloved microblogging service.

Somehow I ended up writing double that but I think I covered a lot of what makes Twitter so great. You can read the full article over on Mobile Industry Review: 13 months on Twitter - A MIR reader’s response to my request for help. It seems I changed his perspective. One more Twitter-skeptic down!

Can anyone think of any benefits of Twitter that I’ve missed?