LONDON I had to unfollow Greater Manchester police (GMP) eventually because they were swamping my timeline, and it's not as if I need any more distraction, but their decision to tweet every emergency call over the course of a day in order to raise public awareness of police work has proved compelling.

For those who don't know what any or all of that sentence means, the police in the English city of Manchester decided to publish the details of their day's work on the microblogging site Twitter, where anyone who cares to follow them could see in real time what the forces of law and order were up to.

At the same time Twitter user @diaryofaledger was just finishing up a charity “tweetathon”, during which he tweeted 40 times an hour for 60 solid hours without sleeping or leaving the house, to raise money for autism research.

An admirable cause, but if I asked people to give to charity every time I sat glued to Twitter for days on end without getting dressed or eating, there'd be no need for any other fund raising. Critics of GMP's experiment, including the respected BBC radio presenter John Humphrys, have questioned the value of police staff tweeting when they should have been out doing the job they're paid to. My literary agent would probably side with Humphrys; he recently declared that 40 per cent of his authors had delivered books late this year, and he blamed this entirely on Twitter.

The fact that he posted this lament on Twitter was an irony that didn't go unnoticed but still, it's a serious indictment of the seductive and addictive power of those 140 characters.

I've been a late convert to Twitter; when I first heard about it, my response was to sneer loudly. As a child I used to imagine what it would be like if people really had thought bubbles above their heads like in cartoons, and you could see what everyone was thinking all the time. Twitter has made this a reality — but those who dismiss it as a bunch of celebrities over-sharing about their breakfast cereal have never fully engaged with its potential.

For any person or organisation whose work involves communicating with the public, there has never been a cheaper or more effective way of reaching people. Protest rallies and petitions are organised through it; journalists and police can appeal for information; and any artist can alert fans to new gigs or publications without needing mailing lists or advertising. Depending on who you follow, you can often pick up on news stories from around the world before the mainstream media discover them.

Bosses who ban Twitter from office computers might be missing a vital trick if employees need to gather data quickly from a wide range of sources.

I love Twitter; maybe too much. I love the fact that people have bought my books because of it and been kind enough to tell me so; I love my strange overlapping networks of interesting people keeping me in touch with their part of the world, and that I have been invited to events and made friends in real life with people I might not otherwise have met.

But at the same time I am appalled by how much of my time I allow it to eat. At the time of writing I have posted 7,100 tweets, which at an average of 20 words per tweet, is the equivalent of a book, words just casually tossed away into the ether, remembered by no one.

It was only when I heard myself say to my eight- year-old son, “Hang on, I'm busy,” while I finished posting some hilarious apercu or other, and he replied wearily, “Sometimes, Mum, I think you like Twitter better than me,” that I realised it was time to wean myself off.

As GMP have demonstrated, Twitter can be an excellent way of engaging with the world around you, but it's no substitute for getting out there and living in it.— Dawn/Guardian News Service