Socializing is both something human beings feel a need to do (therefore useful in itself to satisfy that need) but it can also augment other activities to make them more useful too. The latter requires care not to do "social for the sake of being social in context Y" type stuff though. It has to make sense to facilitate the original goal of the app.
Twitter seems to take some people a lot longer than others to "get" (myself included). But I think that's because we're thinking of it in terms of the latter scenario, i.e. what is its use besides socializing? But socializing is a use in itself too, which we tend to forget (us stereotypically anti-social hacker types... ;).
As an aside, the stereotype of the hacker as anti-social is quite a contradiction to the idea of a hacker founder, since the founder is a leader, front of the crowd. Us hackers these days seem to be turning that one on its head :)
Twitter seems to take some people a lot longer than others to "get" (myself included). But I think that's because we're thinking of it in terms of the latter scenario, i.e. what is its use besides socializing? But socializing is a use in itself too, which we tend to forget (us stereotypically anti-social hacker types... ;).
As an aside, the stereotype of the hacker as anti-social is quite a contradiction to the idea of a hacker founder, since the founder is a leader, front of the crowd. Us hackers these days seem to be turning that one on its head :)