Twitter can seem strange or even useless to some, it depends what you use it for. There are some who think it's for telling the world about the contents of your lunch or for following celebrities (who, btw have nothing interesting to say!).
However, it can be an excellent way of keeping up to date in whatever field you're interested in and for general news gathering. It does it much better than facebook, imo.
There's an excellent app called
TweetDeck which just got taken over by Twitter. If you set it up right, it's a one-stop-shop for news and updates. Not only does it display the tweets of those you're following, it'll also gather your facebook News feed as well as Linkedin, MySpace, Buzz and FourSquare. All your news/status updates in one place.
You can set it up to display real-time searches too, automatically. It just quietly works in the background and will notify you of any updates you're interested in.
There's also an iPhone/Android app which syncs automatically.
I was sceptical about Twitter at first and it took a while to figure what the hell it's good for. But, once you get it organised, get the right app to marshal all the info and of course follow the right people, there is no better news/info gathering service on the planet. ;)