Loving the little blue bird has turned me into an optimist

I love Twitter, and I am not embarrassed to say that I spend a lot of time on it.

- JOHN RENTOUL

It has made my life better; I think it has improved my journalism; and - to make this a little less about me - I think it has, overall, made British journalism sharper, quicker and more democratic.

I have been on it since 2008, thanks to a couple of tech-savvy people who helped expand The Independent website and set up automatic Twitter feeds from our blogs. Ever since then, other people have looked down on it as trivial and time-wasting, but that only makes me love it more.

In the early days, some of my editors were sceptical. One of them commented - in a way that I told myself was more curious than disapproving - that I seemed to be on Twitter all the time.

They seemed unconvinced when I said I thought it was a useful way of keeping up with what was going on, but on the other hand, they could have known I was on Twitter all the time only if they had been on Twitter a bit themselves. It wasn't long before all journalists were being asked to use their Twitter accounts to promote The Independent's articles.

That was when Twitter broke through. One moment it was a side interest, and about half of Westminster journalists were on it. The next it was the hub of British journalism, and the handful of political journalists who were not on it risked being invisible to their colleagues, rivals and the wider public unless they already had established reputations.