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I am guilty of being a Twitterer who joined thinking it was a fun social site. The hype wore off after a couple of months. The reason for this is the constant requests from followers who are marketing their ideas or businesses. Most of my followers are either buisness related or some miracle cure related. At first there were a few friends who signed up for Twitter hearing that a few TV celebs Twittered. That was fun. Then the followers were more and more businesses looking to promote their sites and sell their products.
I do own my own business but I do not Twitter for it. My business is a seperate thing altogether and my social networking is kept social.
Therefore, yes, for the thousands of people like me who joined twitter thinking it was a fun social site, the hype left the buiding a long time ago.
Facebook is the social place to be at the moment and unfortunatly, the businesses on Twitter are pushing the likes of me away.

The new trend. All the world is in it. A great marketing vehicle. Millions of users...

Sounds familiar? Second Life was a fever during 2 or 3 years. Then vanished... Soon Twitter will follow.

Why? Because there's no use for a community of telegraphic messages. No useful content. If you have a busy life, you'll soon find those short-hollow messages an annoying spam. If you have more time to spend, you can endure but will soon give up when the new hype comes (and something will come).

Someone once said that the hours spent on Second Life were about as fun as watching paint dry. Writing (or, worse, reading) short-living strings of characters doesn't seem much better either.

I agree with some of the conclusions drawn (evidence for....) especially early on in the article, while others I disagree with. High statistics of users that created an account but never again logged in or posted a tweet, are clearly indicative that Twitter is a service that a lot of people are still discovering, and that some will dig it and some will not.
As for users with a small number of followers / or who are only following a small number, I would think those folks make up the majority: unless you are a celebrity/net-celeb/business/etc. your ring of followers are most likely going to be people you know personally and whom you've either explicitly asked for their twitter info or whom you've taken the time to track down. And I don't know about others, but I find that if I follow too many people (or people who chose not to limit their posts) the twitter homepage becomes unusable. Thus I don't follow just ANYONE, but tend to be pretty selective.
Anyway, whatever Twitter has billed itself as ("great collaboration tool"? really?) I think it's likely that the way it was originally intended to be used and the way it will actually be used are going to turn out to be two different things. My guess is that in the end it's services (or services very similar to it) will be absorbed by some other site / tool that's capable of what Twitter does and much more, and some day we'll be tweeting without even knowing it.

Yes, I've seen similar stats and wondered the same thing. But I think you're spot on - Twitter isn't a fad but neither is it the best thing ever!

I don't think people will find that they use it as often as Google but it's a handy tool and it's been adopted by the mainstream (TV and personalities are all using it in a variety of ways) so it's going to be around for a while - it's too useful a tool now to just disappear.

Whether it'll still be around in 5 years time is a different matter!