I’ve noticed that people are very divided about Twitter.  A lot of people can’t live without it, but other people just have an unexplainable hatred for the service and its users.  Most people though have no idea what it is, or how it works, or why someone would use it.

I mean, I get people following celebrities.  Judging by how many stalkers they are out there and how many of those mags sell at the supermarket checkout line, it makes sense that there would be a big contingent of celebrity tweet followers out there.  One thing I don’t get though is normal people tweeting about normal things.  Like, you can have access to these people all the time and they’re not famous or anything.  Who really cares what they’re doing.

This week the Howard Stern show joined Twitter after what seems to be much debate among the show’s staff.  Howard has been mentioning it here and there, mostly with detached amusement.  But I guess the show’s executives have been really pushing Howard to embrace alternative forms of media, so on April 9 the show posted its first tweet.

I have to say, most of the tweets are pretty boring.  ‘Playing the Gossip Game,’ and ‘Robin is doing the news’ is not something I’d go out of my way to read.  But it was interesting how Howard posted a video of his dog at the park.  I mean, it wasn’t really interesting except that it was Howard’s dog - and I guess that’s the celebrity aspect of twitter kicking in.

I think the most challenging part of twitter is keeping up with it.  It’s helpful that there are so many applications for the iPhone and Blackberry for twitter, but really, if you’re doing something exciting do you really want to be fiddling around with your phone.

A better question for twitter is how are they going to make any money off of the service.  Even though the posts are relatively small, the company still needs to store and maintain a massive volume of data which will just get bigger and bigger.  They don’t really have ads so far, and they don’t charge for most users.

There have been rumors that Google was in talks to buy twitter for a $1 billion ballpark, but who knows if that’s accurate.  True, today twitter is a valuable web commodity, but it’s not yet apparent if the service will burn out like Friendster, or keep growing like Facebook.

One thing twitter does have, though, is the unique ability to quickly understand trends and events as they happen.  I’d imagine that this data is valuable to someone like Google, who really just wants to serve up better, more accurate ads.  And, with more tweeting from mobile devices you can get data about the location of people - that’s golden for local ads.

In any case, you can follow Stern on twitter by adding the user ’sternshow.’  The show is on vacation this week so there are not a lot of tweets up there yet, but check back next week.

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