Twitter has reached a fever pitch and a saturation point that the only logical step after this is either a complete domination or implosion of the micro-blogging service. Nowhere was this more apparent than this week's “140 Characters Conference” held in New York City.

I'm going to skip the re-telling of the seemingly endless panels of how to market your business on Twitter, all which gave some variation of the exact same message of the need for authenticity and transparency.  If you are a brand or small business, want to be a player in the social media game and you don't get it, hire someone who does so we can talk about something else, please.

The most thought provoking discussions came from questioning what role Twitter has in the face of a crumbling “old media.” It was fascinating to watch panels on how a number traditional outlets media (from a local Orlando paper to Al-Jazeera) are adapting Twitter rather than rejecting it.

There were also discussions on how government is using the site to directly respond to constituents and how to use Twitter for fund raising (one notable example was the Twestival, which raised a ton of money for charity:water).   It's obvious the real time and mobile nature of Twitter has a huge impact on the reporting of news as it happens.  The ability to piece together a story from people at the scene is incredible. This was the under current of the conference, the power of “now”, not searching a Web of “yesterday” or waiting for a journalist to summarize a story that may not even get coverage.  

The conflict between old media and new media came to a head during a rousing discussion that included CNN's Rick Sanchez and NBC's Ann Curry, where the essential question became "Do you want to be right or do you want to be first?" Given what is happening in the media industry today, these are all hugely important questions, but Twitter is just a small part of it. I don't believe, as many people do, that the Twitter stream will replace news.

Now, here's the thing about this conference. It was yet another self congratulatory event with the same group of nerderatti who attend every conference. The same things being told to the same people who had already heard many of these ideas over and over again. And Twitter, while fantastic, is a small piece of the puzzle in how communication and media is evolving.

I couldn't help but agree with presenter Liz Strauss when she posed the following question: “Aren't we getting a little precious about our tools?” And you know, we've been through this before! Those of us who have been on the Internet for a long time can remember the various ways we've gone through this honeymoon phase with dot-coms, social networks, and blogs. 

No doubt have all of those above things  changed the way we do business and communicate, Twitter being no different. But, rather than honing on this one website that still has a huge rate of abandonment and which truly isn't mainstream at all (Ashton Kuchter and Oprah be damned), why not have a conference on the Future of Media or just frankly, the subtitle of the 140 Conference, the "State of Now"? .

Finally, if Twitter is to replace CNN as Brian Solis suggested in his recap of a panel for TechCrunch, what of the people who aren't on it? Are brands supposed to care more about people complaining about customer service on their Twitter stream versus the people who just call a support line? As a few of the panelists pointed out during the first day, Twitter is not the whole world. It means a lot to us, Internet people, but to an average person, this site doesn't mean much.