Bless William Shakespeare, but brevity isn't necessarily the soul of wit. Fart jokes are brief. Knock-knock jokes are brief. Brevity can be as stupid, superficial and worthless as anything else. It just wastes less of your time when it is.

So it figures that quite a lot of what happens inside Twitter's online world must be squandered effort, up to 140 characters at a time. Monday marked the fifth birthday of this latest social network, and with 200 million users or so worldwide, it's clearly growing. The company released a pile of numbers for its birthday showing how the network has exploded - 460,000 new accounts per day in the past month, 140 million tweets per day so far this month vs. 50 million tweets per day a year ago, a billion tweets per week, etc. - but none of that says anything about whether any of it is worth a damn.
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