Why is twitter so capitivating?

The article that I am blogging about is here 
This article was written almost 3 years ago and I was interested to see what is said being an avid twitter user myself. As Johnson stated in the beginning of the article I was also very apprehensive to join the twitter community myself and it took me a few tries to get into the groove of twitter because I really did not initially understand why people were so concerned about other people's lives and what they were doing at that exact moment. I soon learned that it is much more then that and can really captivate my attention for long periods of time. In the article it mentions the same thing, that twitter has an "unsuspected depth." I can scroll through my timeline and see what my friends and celebrities are doing at the exact time that I am possible doing something completely different. I think that in itself is very interesting and keeps me refreshing my timeline to see new tweets.
Another part of the twitter that is mentioned in this article is the hashtag (3) usage and how that can be used to communicate with people all around the world. Johnson talks about while at a conference he saw a conversation via twitter between the people who attended the conference turn into a global conversation with people all over...taking it from a private conversation to a public conversation about education reform. I do use hashtags and I love the idea behind them but this was the first time that I had thought about them being used to turn a private conversation into a public conversation.  I started to think about all the inside jokes that my friends and I turned into hashtags on twitter and that immediately turned them into public knowledge...people may not have understood the jokes though. All of those tweets back and forth to each other keep them all in one place somewhere in the twitter world in cyberspace. Even though conversations such as these can be kept on facebook, twitter groups all the conversations around one hashtag in one place and clicking on hashtag links and reading what other people have said about the hashtags too. That is in itself I think is huge because there arent many places where conversations can occur with those kinds of influences and in that kind of environment.
The end of the article talks about how we are in tough times right now economically and people are figuring out new ways to communicate with each other. That is very true and I find it almost like a comic relief. Using twitter we can all see that we aren't alone when it comes to our thoughts and feelings because there are so many tweets that get favored and retweeted even about the simplest things like..."I love pizza." All of that shows how twitter has changes even since this article was written 3 years ago. Twitter is constantly changing and revamping the website and the apps on smartphones to make it easier for people to communicate with each other.