Personally, I have found facebook to be a great way to reconnect with old friends, as well as keep in better touch with local friends I only see every month or so. As the piece of flair that one of my cousins sent to my 72 year old father said, "facebook - now with old people".
My personal experience with Twitter has been much less satisfying. Perhaps I'm not following the right people, but it doesn't seem to be adding much. Although the NYT says that Twitter is not for teenagers, I haven't found it to be for many of my contemporaries yet either.
Dave Winer suggests that Twitter and facebook are too ephemeral, and is especially upset about the possibility that all the shortened URLs in Twitter will disappear someday. He wants us all to blog, and to store the content is a simple text file.
My 20 year old daughter, on the other hand, thinks no one is interested in blogs. But she does read my family blog, which has been the greatest pleasure I get from social media.
So, where is all this going? For my post, I'm not so sure. For social media itself, no one is sure. There are a lot of different ways to communicate today, both personally and professionally. In both contexts, we need to choose the media that's right for the message and use it.
The real promise here, I think is in SEO and therefore validation on the web. Just my $0.02, but links from a myriad of sources--at least today--still push one's site (or web presence) up in the search results.
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I think you should give twitter another shot. It is a matter of following the right people. It takes tweaking over time. My twitter stream has become this constant stream of relevant information. This is where I find the latest news and blog posts on the topics I care about (running, healthcare, IT, etc.). It is also a great way to tell like-minded people that you have a new blog post.
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