The author completely misses the point of the redesign. The point is to brand Twitter AWAY from being a tool to update your friends and towards being the world's cultural epicenter.
There's a reason Twitter deliberately took away the "you" and focused on the world. They're trying to convince the people who don't think they have anything to say to join.
It's easy to not use Twitter because you have nothing to say. It's harder to ignore Twitter if it's THE place to go for all of the world's events.
There is precious little news that I want to receive in real time, for me the s/n ratio on twitter is simply too large.
Even the 'best' twitterers can't seem to control the urge to spout junk on a fairly regular basis. Too much stream-of-consciousness for my taste. Better filtering would go a long way towards making twitter more usable for the general public.
My colleague does a twitter search on his subway stop every morning. A bunch of tweets complaining about crowded platforms means he takes a different route. I like the redesign. It's about time they recongized that using the great twitter feed is more useful to most people than personal microblogging.
It's easy to not use Twitter because you have nothing to say. It's harder to ignore Twitter if it's THE place to go for all of the world's events.