Jeff Jarvis makes an excellent point about Twitter (and all similar services):

Twitter is temporary. Streams are fleeting. If the future of the web after the page and the site and SEO is streams and I believe at least part of it will be then we risk losing information, ideas, and the permanent points the permalinks around which we used to coalesce. In this regard, Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

You could say the same thing about Facebook streams, only more so - those are more like email - semi-private and soon forgotten. However, I don't think this is a crisis - we've always had "temporary media" (consider the 6:00 news - how easy is it to pull up whatever was reported 2 years ago on your favorite local news program?).

There's the archival stuff (was: newspapers and library archive systems), and there's fleeting (tv/radio). Twitter simply falls into that latter bucket. If you keep that in mind, it all makes sense.

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