This morning Dave Evans has a post stating that 99.99% of whaterver product you choose to examine is useless. Hmm, well I dont' agree. He uses the example of going to a book store and not finding a book that he wanted amongst the thousands in stock, to illustrate his point. Unfortunatly this does not illustrate his point. What it does illustrate is that, at the time, he had very specific requirements (or none at all) which, the small percentage of the thousands of books in stock, that he sampled, did not meet. However, had he wanted to know about .Net internationalisation, for example, then Guy Smith-Ferrier's book would be usefull, 100% of the time.
The same thing applies to Twitter, and the like, which he goes on to say are only useful 0.01% of the time. Again, this is not the case. Twitter just does one thing and that thing is useful 100% of the time if you need that thing, if you don't, its no use to you at all. So, its the ability of a piece of software to fulfill our requirements that makes it useful or not. Unfortunatly, our requirements change with time, that's why web 2.0 software - like everything else - goes through cycles of fashion, and to survive it has to adapt to our changing requirements. It will be interesting to see if Twitter (and the other web 2.0 glitterati) can do that and survive the year.