How can Twitter help me?

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.-  Eleanor Roosevelt

I've been recommending these articles & video to the Twitter uninitiated who ask me about it. A recent NYTimes article lists some ways in which you can make use of Twitter even though you may not choose to post anything:

• Custom news feed - you can track news on specialized topics that traditional media may not cover by aggregating as a RSS feed the tweets of folks who post on those topics
• Lists - Compile a list of people or topics you would like to follow
• Attend a conference, virtually - A lot of people these days tweet about conferences they are attending & provide updates in real-time. If you know the conference hashcode (for instance, #TED), you can catch up on what's happening there & be part of informal "chat rooms". A hashcode is an informal way to "tag" something to a category or categories.
• What’s around you right now - You can catch the local news through Twitter’s list of trending topics which can now be searched by city.
• Ask questions - You can use Twitter to ask questions when you don’t know whom to ask.

Bertalan Meskó, a medical student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, wrote a post about a patient with mysterious symptoms: “Strange case today in internal medicine rotation. 16 years old boy with acute pancreatitis (for the 6th! time). Any ideas?”

Within hours, specialists worldwide had responded, suggesting gallstones, lupus or growths on the pancreas. One of the suggestions helped the doctors with a diagnosis.