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Twitter is fast becoming a serious platform for discourse and discussion. More than a status app, it is being used as a first alert mechanism for the dissemination of news and for immediate discussion surrounding that news. It is the coverage of news events and the continued emergence of citizen journalism that will push Twitter toward the mainstream this year.

Increasingly mainstream news reporters and bloggers are utilizing Twitter to put up news tid bits as they happen, and commentary as it pops into their heads.

Twitter has smartly nourished a large set of tools that help people use the service. This makes it easier for people to get content on Twitter in the manner most convenient and most comfortable to them, which in the long run should help drive adoption of the service. "The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we've done with Twitter," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told us in September.

The API has also allowed for mashups that filter Twitter content making it easier to find. One relevant Twitter aggregator is Politweets (our coverage), which brings together all the messages sent over Twitter about the US election.

Unlike TV or newspaper, Twitter allows for a conversation.

Twitter encourages discourse and feedback. For reporters that aren't afraid to get down and dirty, Twitter is a golden opportunity to build a rapport with readers and gauge public opinion. It also makes readers feel more connected to the news when they can participate in a discussion about it as it happens, often times with the people reporting it first hand.

"It's not right for every piece of information. It's certainly not well suited for longer analysis. But when it comes to instantly assembling raw data from several sources that then go into fully baked news stories, nothing beats it."

But for the mainstream audience, Twitter might need better filtering tools before people can really wrap their heads around it.

it's not threaded, so replies get shuffled around and often times, out of context, just become confusing. Further, when everyone is having a conversation at once, things get noisy. Twitter desperately needs a filter.

Twitter is being used more and more for mainstream news coverage. KPBS News San Diego uses Twitter to put out updates about stories, for example, and during the California wildfires last fall it was a must read. The potential for Twitter to be used for news dissemination is something the site's founders realized early on during an earthquake.

it seems likely that Twitter will become an increasingly more important point for the distribution of breaking news during 2008, to the extent that traditional journalists will begin to pay more and more attention to it the way they have to blogs.