Here's an interesting take from The Times' tech blog on the Iranian protests which shows how sites such as Twitter aren't merely for teenagers (or, for that matter, middle aged editors) who want to tweet inanely:

Twitter is one of the means of communication that appears to be
playing a revolutionary role in the aftermath of the Iranian elections.
Tens of thousands of tweets with the tags #iranelection and #iran are
filling the microblogging service as Twitter users inside Iran get news
out of the demonstrations and beatings and have their tweets passed on.

One of the big trending topics was also protests about the
scheduled maintenance downtime for Twitter which was supposed to be
tonight (Pacific time) #nomaintenance. In response Twitter moved the
downtime to tomorrow 2-3pm Pacific time which is in the middle of the
night Iran time.

Biz Stone of Twitter blogged:

A
critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued
operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host
had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at
NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an
important communication tool in Iran.

Kudos to Twitter for this. As pointless as Twitter seems sometimes,
this shows two things: One - Twitter's growing importance as an
international communication platform and two - its effectiveness as a
interactive communication tool.