Hang on, wasn't it a couple of years ago that people were talking about "Twitter revolutions" in the Middle East? Tahrir Square and all that?
Someone posted a "show a completely random tweet" page the last time this came up, and I noticed that few of the ones I saw were in English and quite a few in Arabic.
Twitter isn't the best tool for family-and-friends; Facebook has that use case covered. But trying to turn Twitter into FB will destroy its usefulness for all the people who want it because it's not like FB. Twitter is best for the question "what's going on in the world now?"