Sure, that's one way to look at it. But the more people you follow (seriously, who in their right mind would follow 50,000 people!), even noise gets noisier. I

Sure, that's one way to look at it. But the more people you follow (seriously, who in their right mind would follow 50,000 people!), even noise gets noisier. I think a quick and neat workaround would be to assign "importance" levels to folks you follow. For e.g. @billgates might be a '1' whereas @amanda9875 might be a '5' - so while you get every tweet @billgates sends out, you might only get every fifth message @amanda9875 tweets.