i found that twitter was getting overwhelming when i was using tweetdeck. i've since switched to nambu and all of twitter's usefulness has come back to me, plus some.

You mention how twitter contains noise, but RSS feeds contain just as much noise (especially if you consider that most of us are subscribed to several dozen rss feeds, many of which produce several articles a day). I love reading Brad Feld's blog, but I am I not really interested in how long it took him to run a certain marathon.

I still rely on NetNewsWire. I find my RSS feeds much more valuable than Twitter. Not only is there a lot of noise on Twitter, but there is a limit to what you can communicate in 140 characters. This seems banal but is true.

I fear people's attention spans have deteriorated to the point where they can't concentrate on anything longer than a few sentences….

While that is the wise way to do it here in early 2009, it shows the need for a more comprehensive reader, something that would know — even if I was signed up for your RSS feed and your Twitter feed — that I have read the story so the reader marks both as read.