The media hype over Twitter peaked recently when something truly incredible happened. Oprah, who is apparently some sort of American celebrity, signed up to the service, and within days nearly half a million people began following her every tweet, grasping to find the profound meanings wrapped in her brief-yet-poetic sermons. They were not disappointed when she announced her presence on April 17th with the immortal words: "HI TWITTERS. THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY."

Sadly, Oprah's random thought ejaculations peaked at around this time, as this graph of her daily tweets shows. Oprah has nothing interesting to say, and she has gradually begun to stop saying it. Unlike some people.

In spite of this complete lack of content, in the time it's taken me to write this much of the post, her followers have swollen in number from 457,500 to 458,257. None of those people have joined because of her content. This is the power of vacuous celebrity obsession in action. Anybody who doesn't understand why a C-list celeb can make hundreds of thousands of pounds selling wedding snaps just needs to look at those numbers.

It also goes some way to explaining the tabloid reaction to this new medium. British tabloids from the Daily Mail and Express down to the Sun and Mirror have become increasingly dependent on cheap celebrity stories for sales, and with people now able to exhaustively follow their tragic idols' every thought directly, newspapers risk being cut out. In this sense, Twitter is far more of a threat than blogging ever was. Most minor celebrities don't have the intellectual capacity to write more than 140 characters on a subject, and when they do it tends to go horribly badly - just go to Amazon and do a search for "autobiography". Blogs were never a useful celebrity medium, but twitter is like texting all their fans in one go - easy.

Of course tabloid journalists are very suspicious of things like "facts" and "actual quotes" and "competing sources of information", but at the same time Twitter makes their jobs ridiculous easy. The main story of page 3 of the London Metro on Monday 20th April was "Now Demi's all a Twitter over Welsh wonder." The entire story consisted of Demi Moore writing the comment "Wow, this kid is something else" on twitter in reference to some kid on some tedious reality show.

So Twitter is both a blessing and a curse. Lazy moronic journalists can simply scan it every morning and pick out a story for the target audiences they share so much in common with. But if too many people start following Twitter, then what are the tabloids going to do? Hopefully go bust, but they'll go down fighting, and thanks to a particularly stupid university press release, last week they had some ammunition.

The Daily Mail led the Charge of the Ignorant Brigade, as always. "Twitter can make you immoral, claim scientists," screamed the headline. Continuing in dumb-speak (seriously, "brain scientists"? Is their target audience twelve?), they said:

"Social networks such as Twitter may blunt people's sense of morality, claim brain scientists. New evidence shows the digital torrent of information from networking sites could have long-term damaging effects on the emotional development of young people's brains. A study suggests rapid-fire news updates and instant social interaction are too fast for the 'moral compass' of the brain to process. The danger is that heavy Twitters and Facebook users could become 'indifferent to human suffering'"

It's all pretty accurate, except that the scientists didn't actually say anything about Twitter, or Facebook, or social networking, or pretty much any of the above. Bad Science blogger Ben Goldacre spoke to the authors of the paper in question, and they responded: "As you can see if you read our study, we made no connection whatsoever with Twitter. Some writers did make that connection but it is not ours. There is no mention whatsoever of Twitter or of any social network in our study. We have nothing whatsoever to say about them."

For some reason I'm reminded of a frustrated Chris Tucker yelling at Jackie Chan in Rush Hour: "Are you understanding the words that are coming out of my mouth?"

Like Tucker and Chan, science and the media speak two different languages, although in this case Chris Tucker was not helped by a somewhat moronic university press release. The job of a university press office should be to translate, not to embellish, or God forbid create.

Leaving this nonsense aside, Twitter still divides opinion among science bloggers. For some it's an agonising battle between peer pressure and the need for focus. For others, we are entering a new man-machine era. Others go into full luddite mode: "The more you Tweet, the less you think. The more Tweets you follow, the less you understand." Which is a comment that interests me only to the extent that it sounds a bit like a song lyric by Paul Weller.

To be honest, some of these criticisms I don't have much patience for. A lot of users post crap, but that's true of the entire internet. Indeed, there's a certain irony in bloggers complaining that the new medium of Twitter means lots of users will post crap.

Me, I dipped my toe in, by signing up for an account and posting blog updates to it. Pretty soon I had a few dozen followers, but I didn't really use the site at all. Then last week, Graham Linehan, (writer of Father Ted and the IT Crowd) found a post I wrote about the Daily Mail and decided to promote it, and I had my first TwitterStorm - thousands of readers sent to my blog by a celebrity tweeter. Suddenly my followers quadrupled in number, not to Oprah proportions, but enough to ensure that Twitter is now a publicity machine working on my behalf.

But it's not just my hit counter that benefits. If you don't subscribe to shit, and take some time to pick out some useful feeds, there is some brilliant stuff out there. Fellow science bloggers are posting a wealth of fascinating links there, and organisations such as the Pew research centre keep a running update of their latest findings. As a source of interesting links shared between like-minded people, Twitter is second to nothing. It's just like the rest of the internet - you have to spend a bit of time learning where to look, but once you do there's a rich and rewarding world out there. And it won't fry your brain, unless you try following Oprah. If there is one piece of information you take from this lumbering malformed beast of a post, it's that you shouldn't follow Oprah.

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You can find me on Twitter here: @mjrobbins.