Ask YC: How do you use twitter/friendfeed with a lot of connections?

I've been using twitter/friendfeed for a while. But I didn't have that many connections. I would go to the Web site every so often and catch up. Then recently, I decided to add a lot more connections to see what would happen. Now there is people on there I don't know that well (or at all), and there are a ton of updates all the time. In other words, I can no longer operate in the same mode as before. If you are someone with a lot of connections, how do you get valuable use out of these services? Do you just use one of these alert things and let the messages pop up all the time? Do you just ignore things you don't see in the moment?