Why are 140 characters so important? What can they say? You see someone cute across the street? They’re walking away. You’re lonely now. Or maybe that paragraph will say that the election in your country was rigged and your peaceful protests are being violently suppressed to cover up corruption.

Twitter is a junction between the world of journalism and the people. It’s live reporting on details, and live sandwich eating, all-in-one. Though it seems that everyone has had this social media service driven into their skull by now, Twitter deserves some of the attention it’s been reveling in.

While it’s plain to see the vast majority of “RT @simonpegg: #realfilmsnotpornfilms Whale Rider”-styled useless tweets, there are also quite a lot of helpful ones. Celebrities aside – your local newspaper, school, fire station and grocery store all tweet.

And they all have plenty of useful information to tweet about. Oranges are on sale; the house down the street is on fire; classes are cancelled, etc. Despite the inanity of the vast majority of tweets, the helpful connectivity of Twitter outweighs the trivial nature that founded it. And this hub of social information has grown vastly as a news source thanks mainly to one very important feature: cell phone updates.

Recently, a man tweeted directly after a plane crash, letting his friends and the authorities know what had happened. On Oct. 27, a cable snapped on the San Francisco Bay Bridge and the first person to report it was a man with a camera phone and a Twitter account.

Imagine a world where everyone and everything can update you or the world via a text message whenever they need to. If you can tell the world anything, from anywhere and at anytime, the news could be more immediate, and less filtered.

Twitter is helping us get there with news. It’s one of the first steps towards instant, on-the-scene, global reporting. That’s not to say that Twitter does not have downsides. Those of you out there who refuse to even dignify the existence of Twitter aren’t without reason. Voices are drowned out, just as they have been in the past. Even if you have something useful to say, people have to dig to find it.

The voices from the Iran election protests were heard via Twitter, but that was one of the very first effective utilizations of the service, back when it was still underestimated. Now that the world has seen how powerful individual reporting can be, it might be tough for such potent lightning to strike twice.

Twitter can also be very difficult to take seriously. Even Facebook comes across as a more reputable source for information. Most of the trending topics and hashtags seem completely superficial and vapid. See #RihannasForehead.

So does Twitter still deserve it’s newly found ego? Well, that’s up to the users.

Twitter is not a gift from above for journalists, it is a way to announce yourself and to get your voice out there. It is what you make it.

To some, it is the primary method to reach an audience without being censored by filters, editors, or even your own government. To others it is a mass text messaging service. Right now, it’s mostly celebrities, gossip, and a hint of news, but it has the power to set up the next major social media as something wonderful – something real.