It's largely replaced Twitter for talking to a lot of my friends. Which is the only reason I ever joined Twitter in the first place - all their Livejournals got replaced by these autoposts of cryptic fragments of conversations, and I reluctantly followed them to this annoying world of ultra-short posts that just kept getting shittier and shitter as Twitter kept on trying to make it profitable. And I can preemptively…
Please indulge me: what's wrong with email for talking to your friends? Unless you think your conversations have to be public for everybody else to see.
Public conversations is part of the point of social media.