The more people I follow, the more noise I have to filter out from my stream to grab the interesting stuff... I'm currently using the official OS X Twitter app (I've also tried Tweetdeck, but all these columns were kind of confusing) and I'm now looking for best-practices or a new productive tool. Any hint?
I just shrink my Following list. I see whose tweets I find interesting and see if they have a website that offers 80% of the stuff they talk about on Twitter and if that’s the case then I remove them from Twitter and just follow their website instead.
I don’t reply to interesting tweets much so may not work for those that want to engage in conversation a lot.
The solution may not be a tool, but simply not following so many people (particularly "noisy" ones). I've also turned retweets off for probably two thirds of the people I follow, so that also helps.
With few exceptions (for especially interesting/notable accounts e.g. NASA, WSJ, HN100, etc) I try not to follow people who tweet more than two or three times a day (shameless plug: I created shouldifollow.com so I can easily see how often someone tweets before following them).
I follow 2000+ people and really nothing seem to work the best. I have tried two ways to read.
Hootsuite
Created 4-5 seperate columns per list according to the priority of the list, e.g real friends come first.
Flipboard.
On flipboard I have only connected my twitter account and manage views by list. Although I can read everything, I believe FB is surfacing the important content on top
I don’t reply to interesting tweets much so may not work for those that want to engage in conversation a lot.