Twitter is certainly getting a huge amount of hype at the moment as it makes the transition from gimmick to becoming a core part of  business and their social marketing plan.
Twitter to many seems like a waste of time and as many tweets revolve around what I ate for breakfast or what my dog just did. As a result of this and not surprisingly there is a lot of scepticism as to whether Twitter is a fad and how long will it last. I myself have times where I tweet a lot and then days go by without a single tweet.
Many smart businesses are now finding that Twitter is a great tool to communicate with customers, make offers and answer support questions. This is based on Twitters ability to connect quickly with a large audience that can see your messages on all types of devices from Internet cafes, to computers, to phones. While I cannot mention the exact number Andy Lark recently told me how much business Dell does via Twitter which was simply astounding.
While we are starting to use Twitter increasingly for our Cadimage Tools business (@cadimagetools) initially we have also found it beneficial as a way of receiving information. *
For those who want to read more here are some recent links that may be of interest:
Twitter marketing tool of the future
Seth Godin outlines on his blog he doesn’t have time to Twitter but does at least have his blog ‘hooked up’ to Twitter so that a Tweet is created everytime he posts a blog item.**
* There are many ways to receive Tweets I find Seesmic Desktop particularly good as I can easily create different lists or groups of tweets so I can easily review them.
** There are a number of ways of having Tweets automatically created when a blog article is published. I use Twitter Tools, Seth uses twitterfeed – there are many more but once set up it is a great way of publishing content to multiple sources in a simple and efficient way.