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Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.

One of the things that amazes me about Twitter is the way it utterly eradicates artificial barriers to communication. Things like status, geopolitics and so on keep people from talking to one another. Those go away in Twitter. You see exchanges that would never happen anywhere else.

The thing I really like about Twitter is the speed with which information reaches me. You find out things from Twitter long before they're on the news. That, I think, is valuable.

Twitter has a several-hour advantage in getting information.

Twitter is the first information that I ingest in the morning. When there are important things happening, friends of mine who follow news feeds will report on it, so I find out about most major news on Twitter.

Twitter is growing up, expanding into other countries, and recognizing that the Internet is contrary to what people hoped; the government does reach into the Internet.

Twitter is incredibly useful. It's a great example of how the Internet is changing the way we engage with information and text. Above all else, this change in the nature of engagement is fascinating for me as a writer.

The Web provides a very easy way to immediately grasp what's going on. It really offers the transparency, so you can see, especially with the search engine, how people are using Twitter at one glance. The phone doesn't allow for that.