If you’re keeping up with the news — from CNN to The State Press — you’re probably sick of hearing about Twitter, unless you’re one of the maybe 0.0009 percent of the world’s population who uses/cares about the site.

For those who aren’t using it, allow me to summarize Twitter: It’s your Facebook status. That’s all it is — a site dedicated to you and your friends’ 140-character blurbs.

Twitter is mediocrity defined. It’s not groundbreaking, and there’s nothing on this site we haven’t seen before. Wikipedia, MySpace and Gmail were all revolutionary. Twitter doesn’t compare with any of these.

In spite of its lack of innovation, Twitter is basically the future. The trend on the Internet is toward investing as little effort as possible into communicating with increasingly large audiences, and Twitter has great potential here. Its lack of innovation might even increase its marketability, since there aren’t any newfangled concepts to get used to when you join. Twitter is like Asher Roth’s song “I Love College” — criticize the content, but there’s undoubtedly a market for it.

It’s a niche the Internet demands: a social media site that combines the format of an online profile with the convenience of text messaging. And the oft-used text-messaging analogy works, because in the ’90s, many people didn’t think SMS would take off (why not call the person?). Text messaging got huge, and so will Twitter and products like it.

Twitter is free of distractions like photo albums, pokes and wall-to-walls, so it has huge marketing potential. A business on Twitter can potentially bombard you with updates and ads much more effectively than a business on Facebook, MySpace or YouTube, especially because there’s not much else to distract you.

As a journalism student, I have a financial interest in Twitter’s rising popularity. It’s a way for whatever company I eventually work for to get easy exposure, which is a big deal when the business models of every major media organization are growing obsolete. For any news Web site, Twitter is like a sexier version of an RSS feed: You can plug your articles all day long in a cutesy pastel layout with a dedicated following.

I can safely assume that the news media in general stand to gain from Twitter’s huge rise in popularity, which raises the question of why there isn’t more criticism about the excessive coverage the press dedicates to Twitter. Yes, it’s newsworthy if a product is making waves and rising in popularity (Twitter’s unique visitors jumped by more than 1,300 percent between February 2008 and February 2009, according to CNN).

But on Google News Tuesday, Twitter had more than 53,000 results. Facebook, for example, had more than 59,000.

Yet Facebook has about 175 million active users, and Twitter has less than 10 million.

This isn’t exactly conclusive evidence, but it’s a good barometer: Twitter is much less consequential than Facebook but gets gratuitous exposure anyway.

Obviously, there’s no conspiracy here. By all accounts, the news media expect Twitter to take off. I agree, despite its embarrassing lack of originality.

By the way, The State Press currently charges a couple hundred dollars for a one-time quarter-page ad, so this column is worth perhaps a few hundred dollars of “free” advertising for Twitter in print alone. Oops.

Reach Matt at matt.culbertson@asu.edu.