What is Twitter good for?

I have a secret: I am not on Twitter. Not that I mind the constraint of writing short messages in the least. After all, I can write haiku. But I have never understood what it would give me to read what other people do - even famous people.
Now, I know I could follow lady Gaga, or Barack Obama, or Oprah Winfrey, or the Ericsson Japan office, or one of a million other institutions and persons. What would I get?
What you get on Twitter is information about activities. Yes, I know there are many stores I could sign up for to get tweets about discounts and so on. But they do not work unless they are time-limited. And I do not have that time. I am not in the least interested that someone is sitting in a seminar and listening to a great speaker - that is nice for them, but unless they tell me how to see the video, it is of no use to me. If I am there, it is even more useless.
Other people are not there only to give me information, for sure. I am really keen on following my friends on Facebook. Like, once or twice a day.
Twitter is fantastic for routine information. I wish I had thought about putting SMSs from a tree or a robot on a website. But exactly this aspect - that it is so good to tell me what has happened - means it is bad at telling me what the exceptions are. I have to track that myself.
And what is news? It is exceptions from the ordinary flow of events. That I am going to the toilet several times a day (to take a less savory example than the "I am having a sandwich" example people usually give of the triviality of Twitter) may not be particularly interesting. If I am having a bloody stool, or the Curry Vindaloo is getting out, it may be more interesting (at least funny - I sometimes use the Curry Vindaloo getting out as an example of how you manage your expectations).
So unless you have something unusual to tell, it is not interesting. And the point about Twitter is that it makes it easy to report things which are NOT unusual. The unusual things simply drown in the buzz.
Now, if you are Barack Obama or lady Gaga, every day will be pretty unusual. I am sure a president of the United States would welcome a day which had only ordinary events - no Euro crisis, no Afghan bombs, no Chinese aggression. Wait, those are ordinary events nowadays. But you get the point. Barack Obama does not have a day when Michelle can ask what happened in the office and he can say "nothing much, dear". Every day is out of the ordinary - which is one explanation for why people whose lives are out of the ordinary have so many followers on Twitter. 
Even though Barack Obama seems like a great guy, I do not know him personally, though. The people I know have lives which pretty much consist of ordinary events, with a scarce irregularity. So they do not make very interesting tweeters. It may be different if they were tweeting limericks, or haiku. But then, there are a number of other questions. One of which is that it starts looking like work. And if Twitter is work, you might as well follow a robot.
I think I will create a program that writes robot tweets as limericks for my next project. When I am done with all those I am working on right now.