The report about the short lifespan of a tweet made the news earlier this week (click on the above link to go to the Read Write Web article). In summary, the conclusion is this:

If you’re looking to get retweeted and nobody picks your tweet up within the first hour, chances are that nobody ever will.

This short tweet lifespan is also the reason why I still get most of my news from Google Reader. I know that a lot of people are switching to Twitter to get their news. But if you’re looking to scan a wide range of news from Twitter, you’d have to be on it most of the time. Twitter is a river of news. If you happen to be off for an hour and the tweet doesn’t get retweeted, chances are you’ll miss the news.

There are arguments (notably from Robert Scoble) that if the news is important enough, it will get retweeted and you will see it. But in my experience, you’ll need to follow a massive amount of people to do that (which Scoble does). I’ve tried following a lot of people and I just get a lot of noise. And since I’m only on Twitter for a couple of hours a day, I’m sticking to RSS reader to get my news.