Steven Johnson’s TIME article makes a great case for Twitter and all of its functionality. He touches on the ways that ordinary people use the site, as well as the ways that celebrities, corporations and educators use it.

On the last page of the article, he begins to discuss the innovations that come along with a site such as Twitter:

Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation…

But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years.

What we see today are entire industries being created online. Twitter alone is a hub of smaller industries coming together to form one big industry through tweets.

There are now people who are paid for the sole purpose of maintaining a Twitter feed. Most every corporation has an employee, often a marketing or PR expert, who fills the role of “social media manager” or some other relatively new position.

Even in an economic downturn, the Internet is thriving and creating jobs in a time where unemployment is featured at the top of every news hour.

Only a few years after its creation, here we are learning how to brand ourselves on Twitter and how that branding will take us further in life.

Sure, many – perhaps most – people see Twitter as ‘just another network’, but the fact remains that Twitter is an industry for those who want to broadcast their message to the masses.