Twitter works well. The reason why a lot of people don't understand it, is because many look at it similar to facebook.
Tweets are public (unless otherwise set.) They are public and indexable, which means they can be searched through. The power of twitter comes in twitter search. Most twitter uses actually search for terms that they are looking for on twitter search (
http://twitter.com/#!/search)
This is where the power is...
If you want to know the gist of what's going on in a particular area, you can just type in a city's name, and see tweets from that area, or tweets that mention that area. Many people search things like "hotel deal," or "cheap hotel in X city" and they find tweets that correspond to what they are looking for.
Twitter works the other way too for business. I set up twitter alerts to alert me when someone tweets anything about staying in Prince Edward Island. I can then respond to the client and offer my services (because it's all public, I don't have to follow a user to tweet them.) I have sold many rooms using this system, and it works well.
You should all try it. It doesn't hurt, and it doesn't take up any time. That's the genius of 140 characters...it's nothing. Use it as a monitoring tool at least..