Is Twitter killing blogs?

Venture capitalist Howard Lindzon was voicing the provocative thesis this week. The convenience of the 140-character microblogging service will result in the demise of “personal diaries” or will at least leave many posts unwritten.
There is a clear tendency to a more concise way to broadcast information, not only in the personal space. Newspaper editors are slashing the length of their articles, for example. Personally, I would rather use the Facebook news feed in order to ping my friends (or followers, if you prefer)… also because most of them are probably not aware of this blog and would never find it.
Twitter is gaining traction, not only in the US. The website received in February 9.8 million unique visitors, up from 6.1 million in January, according to comscore.
Twitter is allegedly now the third most popular Social Media service after Facebook and MySpace, and catching up rapidly.
It is developing an incredible commercial value. Rumours appeared on Friday that Google is pondering an offer, significantly higher than the $255 million price tag that has recently been attributed to the service.
Twitter is talk. If you follow the discussions on Twitter, you know what millions of people are saying. That’s something companies or publicly exposed persons are caring a lot about. If not, they should do it, in order to be able to preserve their brands. Little tools, like Tweeting Trends, Hashtags or Monitter are able to analyse and measure the “talk” and figure out trends. Twitter itself was recently incoporating a search function that makes it easy to monitor specific issues or names.
Its value is probably that Twitter “owns” all this chatter. At present, there is no competitor in sight. After the recent relaunch, Facebook is aspiring a share of the short message revolution and wants to be a tad like Twitter.
I just read by the way that “nanoblogging” is already around the corner…