I ran across this post by Rick Butts about why he thinks Twitter is better than Google for finding information. The gist of it is that:

• It’s easier to write a plain-English question in Twitter than it is to formulate the perfect search query in Google. (True)
• Twitter is composed of humans answering queries to the best of their abilities, whereas Google is nothing more than an inhuman giant database spitting back search results. (True)
• Twitter can’t be spammed or manipulated through fancy technological tricks (True)

“Just join Twitter and attract a group of followers and you’ll soon you’ll have created your own collection of living brain cells, capable of solving problems, reasoning, understanding fuzzy logic, and developing solutions, and pointing you directly to the answers you seek!”

The only thing is, that depends on a group of people “following” you on Twitter who are actually capable– and willing– to answer questions. I don’t see how that is ever going to be a better pool of answers than what you can get by Googling. It seems like the quality of answers will be directly related to the numbers– i.e. the popularity you have already gained in the form of Twitter followers.

Right now, I have 1 follower on Twitter. (Hi, Leah!! You ROCK!!!!). I have done a total of 3 tweets as of today, none of them interesting or relevant to anyone but me. One was about my failed attempt to go shopping at Sprouts. D’oh! I’m afraid I might lose my lone follower.

Maybe I’m still not getting the whole point of Twitter.

Rick concludes his post with this:

“Twitter is not a toy.

It has grown from 1 million users to more than 2 million in a matter of weeks, and spawned scores of new open source applications, that go instantly viral through the busy network Twitter itself.

My advice is to get involved with this new medium now, and start slowly, learning as you go. While there is plenty of help for the thousands of newbies who join each day, if you leap in an puke on this extremely savvy crowd, you’ll be labeled hard and fast, and miss a tremendous opportunity.”

So…. has this swayed any of you Twitter nay-sayers? Or are you still as skeptical as I am about this new medium of communication and marketing?