I enjoy Twitter (and other feed/social interfaces like HN) but many aspects of these designs are abusive/exploitative of attention, creating a false sense of novelty and urgency.
I expect as this becomes better understood, intelligent summaries and filters, at longer controlled intervals, will become more prevalent. The 'Nuzzel' service, which builds a TechMeme-like summary from your own network, is one step in that direction.
A feed service that's loyal to users/developer, rather than advertisers – like App.Net, even if not App.Net itself – could also be an important part of the future. Why? What's needed is client/UX innovation that actually calms the interactions, via reordering/rearrangement/aggressive-filtering leading to less (but higher-quality) engagement... and Twitter/Facebook have strong incentives in the other direction.