i like twitter for reading everyone else's business (go, martin!) but i dont get to log on til the end of the day and then ive got three pages worth of tweets to read.
Trying to constantly play "catch up" with all your followers tweets is a surefire way to get sick of Twitter and cast it off as a waste of time.
Twitter isn't a surrogate message board, and it's intentionally not designed for extended conversation threads, so there's no point in trying to "keep up" with anything. If you look at Twitter as a firehose from which you selectively take short drinks from every once in a while, it becomes less of a chore, and more of a fun diversion...kinda like opening up fortune cookies periodically throughout the day.
If you really wanna play the catch-up game, then use a dedicated Twitter program, instead of the website.
TweetDeck, in particular, lets you create selected groups of people (or even search terms) whose Tweets you are primarily interested in, and lets you tune out everything else. This has come in super handy for following Fuel Dump. Check it out:
The 4th column only shows tweets from people I'm following who are Friends of Tom, and the 3rd column only shows Tweets that contain "@scharpling" and the hashtag "#FD" (some false positives slip through that one, unfortunately). I realize that following someone who likes Gary Cherone is probably on the level of Fight Club fandom, though.
The good stuff on Twitter also generally makes it onto Favrd.com, via Twitter's "Favorites" function (the little star you can click on when you hover over a Tweet in the web interface), so if you just want to see stuff that people thought good/funny enough to Favorite, Favrd is the place to do it. (i.e.
http://textism.com/favrd/person/scharpling).
And of course, you do know that you can read Twitter on your mobile phone, using any number of freely available mobile Twitter clients and/or optimized web interfaces?
