Journalists also use the site as a means of boosting their profiles and work, as Standpoint's Jessica Duchen does: Jessica's blog last month on opera programmes got a fantastic response on Twitter. Even comedians compete to impress the Twitter audience by displaying their wit in only 140 characters. Jimmy Carr tweeted: "On the radio they said the CWU were sent a letter by Royal Mail executives aimed at averting a postal strike. Probably didn't get delivered." 

But most importantly, Twitter also promotes those causes that wouldn't usually receive much coverage, such as a Carter-Ruck injunction against the Guardian. Joshua Rozenberg was one of the first to break the story on his Standpoint blog, and within hours it was one of the most talked-about issues on Twitter. 

But when the Daily Mail's Jan Moir complained that she was the victim of an "orchestrated campaign" after a controversial column about the late pop singer Stephen Gateley, she displayed her lack of understanding of Twitter. Yes, there are prominent tweeters — the "twitterati" (think Stephen Fry) — who influence what people are talking about, but the point is that Twitter works on moments of spontaneous people power, when users quickly tweet brief comments about something they're passionate about. Sometimes, these can be tweets of great importance, such as from people involved in the Iranian protests. At other times, the top ten topics on Twitter can be trivial: the new Twilight film or the latest X Factor result. Either way, Twitter is a news force to be reckoned with.