In my portrait Twitter consists mainly of social benefits yet it offers few private gains for many generators of the content. So why do so many people do it? Maybe it tricks our instincts for sociability or connection.
We can use the information generated by Twitter in interesting ways. What’s not so clear is what the Tweeters get out of it.
There are no financial costs to using the service, but it does have to compete with other social networking sites (so there is an obvious opportunity cost) and time costs to using the service.
In terms of evolutionary adaptation, what are the benefits of using twitter to improve fitness (what are the proximal psychological causes)?