Zbig's dashboard

As much as Twitter appears to be all the rage judging by some recent news reports and on-line blogs, it is far from what it's cracked up to be, in my opinion.
I would categorize Twitter as a SMS-based bulletin board. It lets you set up your own bulletin board that others can read. The only real advantage is that when you post something on your board that post gets distributed to those who have indicated that they want to 'follow' you as opposed having to come to the bulletin board to check if antything new has been posted.
However, all that assumes that everything is working and that assumption is not a gimme by any stretch of the imagination. Just check all the questions and comments on this forum. Add to that all the issues with access in different countries etc. and you need to seriously evaluate whether it's worth all the trouble.
In general, I would say this: if you have a real need to keep a large group of people up to date on information that you have then Twitter may provide some useful service. However, if you currently do not send out more than 20-100 SMS messages per month then you might just as well send these messages directly to those people from your cell phone and forget about Twitter.

Thanks mdy for doing some of the leg work for me.
Usually, I try not to discover how things work by trial-and-error. The danger is that things may work in a certain way not because they were intended to work that way but because there is a bug etc.
However, the lack of a comprehensive help section is a huge shortcoming. The Twitter home page should have a big, bright button labeled "Twitter tutorial" containing a narrative of how to interact with Twitter and what to expect at each step. For example, the process of registering one's cell phone to start following someone is sorely missing. I had to go through it several times in order to gather enough information to put together a little 'cheat sheet' that I then distributed to the people to whom our organization is promoting the Twitter service as a means of delivering urgent and important, time-sensitive news bulletins.

I understand, however, what's at play. The company running Twitter is made up mostly of software engineers/programmers etc. who are typically loathe to write manuals and user guides (I speak from experience although I have been able to control my 'loathing' and I take great pride in writing manuals and guides from my intended user's perspective, which is someone who is not familiar with the intricacies of the application and all its bells and whistles and who does not assume anything) I usually divide my guides into three sections:
1. this is what this system is intended to do
2. this is how it interacts with other systems that you may be familiar with
3. this is what will happen as you go about using it
In other words, he things that I expect to know before I start using something that I'm not familiar with.

ThomasHan, that's not what I wanted to hear because it goes against the whole concept of Twitter which is answering the question "What are you doing?"
I'm not interested in what someone in the UK that I have never even imagined existed is doing. If that person just by sheer luck happens to use in the content of his own update a word that I am tracking then I will receive it as a completely spurious notification. I imagined Twitter to be like a large restaurant. There are people sitting around many tables eating and carrying on a discussion. Some tables are large, some are small. I'm with my group of people and I'm interested in our table's discussion. The tracking function is like setting up a microphone under all the other tables and listening in on their conversations. Plus, the people at the other tables KNOW that there is microphone under their table which means that they will either limit their conversation to trivial things or they will intentionally say something to provoke a reaction. Hopefully, for the time being I will be able to get around this undesired feature by using tracking expressions that are very unique.

The lack of tech support from Twitter is becoming more and more disturbing. It leads me to believe that the true nature of Twitter as an over-hyped, niche-market, barely significant flash-in-the-pan is finally becoming visible.