I use Twitter in a very different way than Facebook though, and for very different reasons. I follow a small group of smart, funny or creative people that tweet really interesting stuff, but personally I tweet only a few times a month. Am I alone in that I don't use Twitter as a social networking tool, and more of a broadcasting-listening tool?

To anyone looking at my twitter, it might seem extremely quiet and ghost-townish, but I am using Twitter much more than Facebook and getting more from it, albeit passively.

Twitter is, for me, very much a "right now" tool. I used to read up on missed posts, but now I just follow too many people. So I look at the recent history of a couple of lists, then look at even less of my main stream for interesting conversations/links.

FB/G+ feel far more involved, even if I'm doing the same thing. I chalk this up to the conversations being longer, and more in depth/nuanced.

I use it the same way as you do.

For me the Twitter use case is to keep myself stimulated while working remotely by interactions with other people in my field, catch breaking news as it happens (e.g. blog articles on new tech), and to promote work that I have done (e.g. blog articles I have written). So when I am working actively on a project, I probably check 4-6 times a day. In between I probably check 2 times / week. I also have used monitoring tools like awe.sm to see how many people re-tweet things that I tweet out, among other things to make sure I'm providing value to people that are following me (i.e. high signal to noise ratio). I also use twitter to answer questions that I can't find the answers to elsewhere -- generally very technical questions.

Facebook is a tricky one, since it promotes addictive "stalking" behavior. I've attempted to use it primarily for messaging and to hide most people who aren't in my immediate vicinity, thinking that I probably don't need to know what they are doing. Still, I am a part of "liking" tribes where there is an implicit economy of trading likes on something and receiving likes back.

G+ I only use when I get annoying messages from Google that someone has asked me a question or added me to some circle. Other than that I avoid it like the plague -- this despite being an enthusiastic adopter in the early days.

LinkedIn I use probably once a month, except in the occasional moments where I am actively networking. I get very little value here since I am not usually looking for work and the technical folks I interact with are available on Twitter (or, at worse, email).

Twitter was amazing just after the big quake hit here in Japan. Facebook also proved useful, but the cell networks were simply not able to handle the traffic and all my friends switched to twitter to communicate.