I agree 100% with this, the whole Web20/Social Networking hype look a lot to me like a mini-bubble.

We should not however loose track of the fact that there is something very big happening behind the hype and the tools from geeks: there is a social trend underlying, and people are learning to interact more, and in a different way. Michel Bauwens calls it the P2P civilization, Xavier Comtesse talks about the Value Chain 2.0.

While I have no clue why Twitter is so hot (but I may not be the ideal target for them), I know that the tool that are being made available allow a much richer interaction, and they displace the conversation from behind the close walls of the corporation into the rest of the world. Diebold learned it when they tried to stop the spread of news of bugs in their source code, which was made available on forums.
Employees blog outside their office, customers too, and there are conversations happening that you need to monitor if you want a better understanding of the ecosystem around you. And while a lot of the noise is just that (the twitter guys telling me they just got a glass of water), there is also a lot of “experts” talking about things they care about, and other posting comments etc… That part is not just noise, the challenge is to be able to extract the essence.

Why is it the GuruVangelistPerts on Social Networking seem to Twitter from bars or about going to bars so often?

That is called mythomania.

Either way: I couldn’t agree more with your last paragraph.