I recently started using Twitter even though the firm has been building and managing accounts for clients for a while now. Admittedly, I wondered why one would tweet instead of IM, or call, or e-mail. Now, I think I am getting it.

First, it’s fun. To the uninitiated, Twitter is really your own personal Presidential microphone. Sure, if you have no followers, then no one will be listening. What I have learned is that everyone on Twitter has a following, and not just the movie stars and the pornographers.

Since starting my account last month, I have nearly 30 followers and am following more than 60 people/organizations. I tweet about personal interests and share links to stories that might interest others. The real fun does not appear to be the tweeting, but the ability to observe what your Twitter friends are saying. For example, I am a huge fan of HBO’s Entourage, therefore a huge fan of Jeremy Piven’s fire-breathing super agent, Ari Gold. I get a massive kick out of reading his tweets, if only for the fact that it means I have a direct line of communication (albeit one-way) with a favorite actor of mine. Piven has tweeted a lot lately about preseason football and his appearance on Letterman. I did not learn much, but hearing from him was fun.

But if I had to defend Twitter to the “Why don’t you just pick up the phone?” crowd, then I would say this about the medium: It is the ultimate tool for narrow-casting. The links people share with others, most of the time, are interesting reads about things that interest me. They are also typically content of the hard-to-find variety. No one is tweeting obvious things like, “Did you know health care reform is stalling?” The tweets that keep me tweeting are about little nuggets of information that you can’t get on CNN.com.

It seems to me that this is the real power and influence of social media – the sharing of specialized content among like-minded parties. I think it would be impossible to replicate this experience on e-mail or phone calls. People can barely keep up with their e-mail. But people go out of their way to tweet?

Is e-mail a dinosaur?