It allegedly has brought down despotic regimes, given a global platform to an exciting new breed of digital seers and democraticised “real-time” communication.

Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday, a landmark anniversary hailed by the social media community as earth-shattering and celebrated by the rest of us for being at least as important as the invention of Blu-Tack.

The micro-blogging site is now regarded as an essential “inclusion out-reach” tool for presidents, pop stars and self-promoters, people like myself. Everyone is at it. I tweet, therefore I am.

So is Twitter a force for good? No.

Is humankind more informed because of it? No.

Am I going to stop using it again (I quit once – two people noticed – one said it was a shame – so I returned)? Probably not.

But if I did stop using it, if I really did, would I be doing so for noble, altruistic reasons? Nah. It would be out of boredom.

Because a lot of the 140-character traffic on Twitter is mind-numbingly dull. I’ve heard snooty commentators complain that people merely write about what they are eating, drinking or playing on their iPod. Like, hello? That’s the interesting stuff. That’s what I do.

It’s the majority of the rest of the postings that are drivel.

Ok, let’s hammer this myth once and for all, the one that says Twitter has given “top spin” or “traction” (or whatever the latest buzz-word is) to the rise of the “citizen journalist.”

According to this argument, the Average Jo or Joan, thanks to Twitter, can act as a valid gather and disseminator of news. And indeed they can. Jo and Joan can tell you stuff, stuff you might not ordinarily know about, like the winner of the tombola at the annual church fete.

There’s nothing wrong with gossip and title tattle, just as there’s nothing wrong with plain old “stuff.” I love it all. Stuff rocks.

But the best news tweets are post by the people and organisations who have always done news, be they print media, radio or TV stations. There are so-called independent political/celebrity/lifestyle/sport tweeters of note but the numbers are tiny. Most either work for, or are associated with, what might be termed the mainstream media, be they correspondents, newsdesk executives or commentators.

I’ve tried following some of the cutting-edge US ones, the ones with groovy, very now names and zillions of followers, but they’re so earnest they’d make a man named Ernest seem trivial.

Sure, if a plane lands in the Hudson River and Joe or Joan upload a picture of the stricken aircraft via Twitter then that’s great (as happened in 2009). It’s great headline stuff but it doesn’t tell you anything about what happened, what went wrong, what the implications might be. The maligned old media do that.