I screen information by being very, very, selective about what I read, when I read it, and what channels of information I use. I can scan reading material pretty fast, but I have *no* patience with weeding out wheat from tons of chaff and dreck. Which is why I don't follow a whole lot of blogs, other than my Live Journal. Yes, I'm missing a lot of interesting information--but I'm not missing information that is *vital* to me, and I'm not stressing myself out trying to read everything in the world that might conceivably be interesting.

I can understand how some people might want to use twitter to create small personal networks to make it easier to "hook up". But the fact of the matter is that I have never had a large enough social network to feel a strong interest in technology that would assist me in doing so. So maybe the "social" aspect of twitter is not just a generation thing, maybe it's not even primarily a generation thing. It may be an extrovert-type of thing.

Thanks for the comment; yours is the most interesting explanation of "what twitter is good for" that I've read so far.