We love the Internet!
Seriously. We Do.

Heya OhDoctah. Good advice! Definitely don't follow someone you dont think adds value to your twitstream. It's ALLLL about the QUALITY of the twitstream you create as a Twitterer. One thing I want to add is that those people who follow 12K+ people and try to sell their advice are Network Marketers and snake-oil salesmen--not real Marketers. Real Marketers have real jobs in marketing or PR. Those guys don't (for obvious reasons). ;-) That's why they try to make a buck w/ that spam. I'm actually a real marketer. All the real marketers & PR people I follow are very insightful and interesting. I'll DM you a few @names of the best and brightest.

you're right...
the thing is you have to realize that "follower" doesn't equal "friend" necessarily. everyone has to find out for themselves who they want to follow or not, some seem to just collect randomly in hope people follow back and so they get a high followercount. some become sad or mad at you when you unfollow them, and i even caught myself thinking too much about the loss of certain followers... it doesn't have to mean they don't like you, even though twitter is also a "social network" or CAN be depending on how you use it.

the people i follow are mostly people i know IRL personally from barcamps, pl0gbars, projects or whatever, friends or people i like and/or that i know from other SNs, or people i don't know but whose tweets and opinions or humor i like, companies or products i want to support or be informed about updates. sometimes when new people follow me i follow them back and when i see that the tweets they post are really not interesting me i unfollow them, hoping they are not mad or sad if they see it. :) i stopped using quitter or that other tool to see when someone unfollows me cause it made me think too much as well.

the thing that is really bothering me about all this is that if there is a temporary hype topic and people i like start chatting at twitter about that (lets say a tv show or an event) and it's getting too much for me.... i do not want to unfollow them so the only chance i have is to use twhirl or tweetdeck and filter the tags "-#gntm" for example :D

filtering/grouping:
i use saved searches for people and some words/hashtags that are important to me - this way i don't miss anything they say.
i get about 3200 updates in 24hrs, and i really can't read all this. so i HAVE to use some filtering method. I am sure i'm missing intersting things this way but i hope if there's a buzz i will realize it from the RTs - maybe a little later but that is the compromise.
it's not only a question of a tool being able to do filtering, it's also a conceptional thing, you have to KNOW what you want to read and who to follow. Sometimes this is hard to do because of the social aspect i mentioned :)

just wanted to share my thoughts...

i wrote about this in german in my blog a while ago, if someone wants to read it : http://bit.ly/UHWxB