Struggling to understand microblogging

Fliss has been playing with the king of the micro-blogging platforms Twitter. It something that has been making the news on a regular basis as more celebrities have accounts and more news stories break on it. I'm still not sure where it fits in in the social media pantheon. I prefer blogs for espousing thoughts (although often the comments are where the real discussions take place). Tweets just seem to be a slightly more democratised form of Facebook's status updates. While Facebook decides who's updates you see based on some form of magic heuristic the tweeter stream seems like some sort of firehose. Consider people like twitter fan Stephen Fry. I'm sure following 32000 people must be like reading a disorganised set of RSS feeds with most of the summaries making no sense out of context.

The times I update my Facebook status are varied and the updates themselves often very random. I'm not sure how often my updates generate any form of interaction. However I suppose it would be nice to do them outside of the walled garden of Facebook but I'd be wary of going from one closed platform to another. Maybe I should look at one of the Laconica based services? How people who want to stay on Twitter/Jaiku/Pwnce/Walled Platform of choice follow me?

But perhaps people could start by telling me why they like Twitter and what they use it for? Understanding would seem to be the first step.