I found this post from Scoble highly amusing:

The social network features suck. Managing friends in Google Reader is slow, and hard to do. Not that Twitter or Facebook is perfect but they are a LOT better than Google Reader. I am following more than 10,000 people, brands, objects etc in Twitter. THERE IS NO WAY I could do that efficiently in Google Reader

This is in reference to him explaining why he's stopped using Google Reader and instead just follows people/trends on Twitter. I have a news flash for him though: There's no way you can efficiently "follow more than 10k brands, people, etc" in any tool. Period. At best, he's skimming along the surface, and seeing the things that are talked about most. That's fine, but it's not really a failing of Google Reader (or any news aggregator) - you can't use a spoon to cut steak - does that mean that spoons are useless?

The thing is, to "follow" things on Twitter like Scoble does, you have to be watching it at all times. I follow a ton less people than Scoble does, but I still find it impossible to pay attention to the update stream and get anything else done. I have search feeds (using Twitter search) for the things I really need to pay attention to in my *gasp* news aggregator, and then I see them soon enough. Sure, they might have popped to me an hour after they hit Twitter, but so what? Virtually nothing is so time critical that it can't wait an hour. For the things that are, people know how to reach me by phone and IM - because both will grab my attention in a way that neither Twitter nor a news aggregator will.

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