twitter vs. facebook

I tried several social networking sites- orkut, hi5, myspace, linkedin- before finding on Facebook a tool that has a critical mass of utility (ie users who were my real world friends). I joined about the time they started using the newsfeed function (3-4 years ago?) This feature, while much protested by the original undergraduate users, is what made Facebook useful for me in a way that myspace was not. You could see at a glance what friends from around the country were up to. You also got a sense of what your friends in your immediate circle were up to and could talk about it the next time you saw them.

I first heard about Twitter a few years ago while listening to the podcasts from the SXSW technology conference- it seemed to be all the rage among the technology crowd there, but I wasn't entirely clear on the concept. The users described the utility in terms of having a sixth sense of what was going on in the lives of the people around them. The newsfeed on Facebook pretty much does this for me.

The other thing I didn't understand was how it was used from a time managment standpoint. It seems like constantly updating your status would be a pretty big time suck, unless you were already used to texting from a mobile device on a regular basis. And where do you read your updates? Are people sending you texts every 30 seconds? Is it like IM which I find intrusive and difficult to use?

Anyway, these blog posts were helpful to me in trying to understand what it's all about:
http://www.twitip.com/twitter-versus-facebook/
http://www.twitip.com/the-misunderstood-uses-of-twitter-and-facebook-are-you-a-friend-follower-or-a-fool/

It seems like twitter is more about networking with people you don't necesarily know in real life, while Facebook is a tool for maintaining/augmenting your real-world social networks? Is this accurate? Twitter users out there- what do you do with it? I'm thinking about checking it out, but still don't quite understand if it's something that would be useful to me. On a side note, I also have kind of an aesthetic pet peeve about twitter/tweets. If you're going to send tweets, why not call it Tweeter? Or vice versa? Would I really be able to convey ideas I want to get across in 140 characters? I already find the limits for commenting on articles posted on facebook to be inadequate.

Like more:
email
facebook
phone
reading blogs, articles
ability to communicate with people I don't know
intelligent discourse on comments/message boards

Like less:
Text messages
IM, chatting
"pokes"
application requests
friend requests from people I don't know
hyperpartisan discourse on most comments/message boards

Should I use twitter? Do you use twitter? Help me out here!