It's more than that, though.

1) You can't make a reasoned argument in 140 chars. You can make a soundbite.

2) Link shorteners and URLs only serve to offload the discussion elsewhere - in effect, Twitter saves people the toil of performing a Google search.

3) Twitter is more easily parse-able by machines than by humans, which is why more than one in ten are bots, and probably a contributing factor to why four out of five Twitter accounts are abandoned in less than a month.

4) A service designed for sparse data usage has no place in a broadband world. Things given up include context, mediation, analysis and all those other things that caused town criers to be replaced with broadsheets.

5) The only users that benefit from Twitter are brands, and they only benefit if they have the volume to drown out snark.

6) The most efficient use of Twitter is snark, which has no place in useful discussion.

I've been a part of a number of productions that value twitter as part of their second screen strategies. The only thing they give a shit about? How much their hashtags are used or retweeted. In other words, even the big companies are essentially using Twitter to mechanical turk their Nielsen ratings. That right there is about all Twitter is good for - crowd-sourcing popularity metrics. But you know what? Joseph Kony is still at large.

Ryan Holiday observed that the biggest success Twitter has enjoyed so far is breaking the news that Osama bin Laden had been assassinated. It accomplished this milestone seven whole minutes faster than CNN.

So there you go. "Twitter: Your Headlines Seven Minutes Faster than CNN." A two-edged sword, to be sure - I know a media operation that lost their CBS affiliation because they believed (and published) a tweet that Steve Jobs had died 14 months ahead of his actual demise. Faster, as it turns out, isn't always better.