I think the biggest problem with Twitter's public perception is the belief you have to tweet to use it effectively. That's not the case at all. If I could only use Twitter in "read only" mode it would still be incredibly useful.
The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.
Indeed it's the "read-only" customers that are the valuable ones. Advertisers don't want to reach people composing 140 character witticisms or bots spitting out links, they want to reach people who are searching for commentary on #subject, have an interest in @celebrity or @publication or are sufficiently bored/distracted to be spending time poring through semi-curated lists of links, observations and slogans that are probably lower in quality than decent branding collateral anyway.
When it comes to following, the issue which has always kept me away from Twitter is that entities and subject-oriented feeds I'd theoretically be interested in following still seem to spit out vastly more noise than signals, and enforced extreme brevity and URL shorteners don't exactly increase the efficiency of parsing the crap
The real trick is curating the right set of accounts to follow, which I think is the second biggest problem with Twitter's public perception: "Following" on Twitter is nothing like "Friending" on Facebook or "Linking" on LinkedIn. Users should feel no compunction about promiscuously following every account they think they might be interested in or for which they see a funny/clever/informative retweet, and guiltlessly unfollowing any account that is wasting space in their feed. But I suspect many novice Twitter users think their Twitter "social graph" should mirror their graphs in other social media, where connections are supposed to more strongly reflect real life bonds. That's a recipe for a boring feed.