Will twitter survive?

I know a lot of people have been writing about this already, I probably don’t have that much more to add that has not yet already seen but I do not get it. I can’t see how it can survive.

Here is what I know:
- You can only enter about 100 characters, this means you can reference information or not say too much. I suppose that is why it is called micro blogging. Of course referencing other pieces of information is very useful but as to publishing some, you can only really give a quick status update. I have been following a few people and unless I have some background on their status, it does not really say much.
- You can follow anyone you want and they don’t even have to approve you. Cool for me, it is a bit embarrassing to have to refuse someone because you don’t really know them well enough. On the other hand, you might end up by having so many followers that you don’t really know anymore who you are saying things to. That must be quite a restriction, of course I don’t really know, but it is not about sharing your status with your friends anymore.
- You can send messages directly to someone, whether you are following them or not. If you are a fairly popular person, again which I am not, that can make it very difficult for you to keep up with the ones you actually care about.
- There is certainly a good reach, lots of tools for you to be able to post from lots of different devices. The benefit of an open API I suppose.
- There are ways for now to search/tag/monitor the data going through twitter. This is great stuff, I remember looking at a map of the world and a popup would come up every time someone would twitter.
- They do not seem to have any business model yet. In this day in age, that is a small miracle. It does say a lot about how popular this is.
- Every now and then some suspicious user is trying to get me to follow them, I suppose we should invent a new word for this, it could be micro-spam.

I can see the benefit for a company to look for keywords about the company, the product and keep a pulse on what is being said. It seems to be a very good PR tool. It seems to have been used a lot during key and significant events.
Maybe I just don’t get it, but I still don’t really see the point. I can’t say anything of consequence, I could be referencing something I wrote from somewhere else but then I could just write it in Facebook and all the people I do care about will read it from there.
At this point twitter seems to be used so you can update your status in other applications at the same time, again the benefit of open APIs, but I can’t see why it can’t be done in the other ones.
You can apparently follow publishers you care about and read the news that way, but I already have a news reader, is twitter giving me anything different?
The bands, famous people and companies seem to be using it to be cool and publish ‘good’ information about them. They have other people populating the information for them.

If it stops being a fad, what else is there? Is it more a reflection on the fact that we focus less and for shorter period of time and all we can come up with is about 100 characters? Maybe I am just missing the point, the fad is the point and it will always be there. Some part of me can only hope that it is not the case. Maybe all we need is easier tools for blogging and we can still make quick and easy posts to the web for all to know.