Replacing Twitter: Uses of Microblogging
There is a tension between microblogging as social activity and reading a microblog site for news. One wants to know the official announcements of, say, the state of Texas or the Tory party. Yet if these things came from your friends or even casual contacts you would ignore or block them. This is the balance one negotiates on Twitter. To effectively replace Twitter a site or a service has to support this balance.