Did I just read a massive blog entry that can be summarized as "I don't read everything people tweet, just some of the newer tweets when I'm bored"
Thanks for the tl;dr. I wasn't bored enough to read the article.
Early in a Twitter users life, you realize you can't read everything. That's fine. But what's harder to overcome, is not opening up the stream as a means of distraction. Humans' basic foraging tendency makes it so enjoyable to find that little piece of interesting information. Except you do that too often, and you don't actually get anything done.
I use twitter exclusively for breaking news and only access it via TwitterGadget on my iGoogle homepage. I only follow a handful of users and almost never tweet myself. I've pruned down the list of users I follow to those that consistently post interesting content related to financial markets and/or major news stories.
As Twitter continues to evolve into a distributed real time news feed. Suggestions like those by Mr. Tenner will help encourage a better set of expectations for tweeters and followers. I personally am most impressed with Twitter's real time emergency response capabilities.
I follow approximately 500 accounts, so that can be a bit hard to manage. However, I've found that the Twitter lists feature has been pretty good for keeping up to date with the people whose updates really matter to me.
I follow nobody and have my Github wired up to tweet whenever I push code. The end result is that my Twitter is an annoying yet reliable reminder of how much code I produce.