Does Twitter make sharing easier?

That’s the assertion of Twitter’s creators:

Twitter, founded by Stone, Williams, and Jack Dorsey, has about 6 million users, which, all told, isn’t all that many. (The Twitter user with the most followers is Barack Obama, with 237,500, or about as many people who voted for him in Idaho.) Compared with Facebook, which has more than 150 million users, it’s puny. But it’s different from Facebook. It, as Williams puts it, “lowers the bar.” Twitter is the logical next step from blogging. It’s one thing to start a blog. But it’s much easier to type 140 characters and send it out into the ether. It’s streamlining information. “It’s another step toward the democratization of information,” Williams says. “I’ve come to really believe that if you make it easier for people to share information, more good things happen.”

Are the Creators of Twitter Living in the Last Dreamworld on Earth? — New York Magazine.

But I don’t agree. Sure, some of the site’s users are happy to just tweet 140 characters worth of sentiment. But look at any heavily-used Twitter page, and you start seeing a lot of abbreviated links that point you to other text, pictures, videos, etc. In contrast, Facebook lets you upload a whole world of information, including the ease of sharing links to whole articles you’ve found with commentary, entire photo albums, and so on. And more and more mobile phones can support the Facebook platform, and more and more people are using those types of phones.

So why would you need information simplified, or streamlined, if you can get it all with another application?

Now while I have a Twitter account, I’ve never used it – I parked my name because I didn’t want some other Twitter user named Michael Roston to own it. But when you get down to it, I can update people on my status, and photos, on the go from my Facebook application on my iPhone. Twitter is just another distraction in an increasingly busy life, and I don’t want it.

What do you think? Will Twitter be a charging success, or a cautionary tale?