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Similarly with blogs, photostreams, generic web sites, etc. It can all be a PR tool. It can all be banal. It can lob grenades that spark research or discussions or the genuine (unpaid) discovery of a neat product. Twitter is what you make of it. And you can find pretty much whatever you're looking for.

Though I'm definitely with you on the protocol/provider bit.

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"Twitter is what you make of it."

If what most people make of it is banal posts and celebrity watching, is it deserving of all the hype?

Again, you could say that of the internet in general.

A medium is (un)deserving of 'hype' based on whether it can be used to do anything that appeals to us.

The Internet in general is not as narrowly scoped as Twitter's feature set, so that is not the same.

I don't see how scope is relevant.

The argument is: do interesting uses of Twitter exist? If they do, the banal is irrelevant, since you never need to see it to access those interesting uses of Twitter.

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