I spend far less time on Fbook as a result of my Twittering. I trade out of my home office and like having an outlet to the outside world during the day. Comment by Dave — March 11, 2009 @ 2:11 am

I use http://www.twitterfeed.com to RSS my Facebook status to Twitter, 2 birds with 1 stone. Now the real question is, where does Facebook time come from? Although as a telecommuter, it’s not much different from water cooler time in a normal workplace… Comment by Patrick G — March 11, 2009 @ 2:45 am

I pretty much stopped checking/using Facebook, so that freed up some time. Also, I have TwitterBerry on my BlackBerry that I can check during class or while walking/traveling after I check emails. I would imagine a lot of people make use of Twitter on-the-go through a client or SMS. Comment by Geoff — March 11, 2009 @ 7:01 am

Clay Shirky makes a slightly different argument, taking a macro-historical perspective:

I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

So the question is, is twitter the gin or the museum?