There must be a lot of twits running around because it seems like everyone is tweeting. Everyday, another article hails Twitter as the latest social media rage and no wonder. According to CNN.com, Twitter grew by a whopping 1,374 percent in the past year to 7 million users from less than half a million a year ago. That's a lot of twits.

In the Twitter world, you communicate with people in short phrases of 140 characters or less, called tweets. Twitter lets you follow people, and the people with the most followers are the biggest twits, or as Twitter users prefer to think of them, the most influential. Shaq has over 400,000 followers and trend setting celebrities, politicians and bloggers all have their own Twitter groupies who monitor what they are doing from minute to minute.

You can even follow me on Twitter: Jon_Pushkin. I'm approaching 100 followers, which makes me not very influential but interesting enough for some people to want to know what I'm up to. As we say in show biz, there's no accounting for taste.

Some people think Twitter is the future of journalism, public relations, and all human communication. There are others who feel that Twitter is dangerous, addicting, and a narcissistic cult. I'm somewhere in the middle, still making up my mind.

Twitter can be annoying. Frankly, I don't care what you are having for breakfast or when you go to the gym or how long you had to wait in line at the airport. I have better things to do than tweet every five minutes about every thought that enters my head and the last thing I need is some other excuse to play with my iPhone more than I already do. Call me old fashioned but I am still fond of face-to-face communication. I would hate to miss the really important things in life because I was too busy worrying about the mundane.

But if you are an entrepreneur or a business leader, you need to know about Twitter, Facebook and the other channels that tech savvy people use to communicate. If you want your brand to be visible and respected, you need to monitor and participate in the conversation or you won't be considered credible. And people won't want do business with you.

At it's best, Twitter is more than just inane chatter. It provides instant breaking news updates, commentary and insight into the views of influential thought leaders more directly than ever before. It can even help you understand different points of view.

OK, maybe Twitter doesn't boldly go where no man has gone before, but it's a start. Beam me up Scotty. Let's shift her into warp drive and see how we like the ride.