It depends on who you follow. I try to follow mostly technical people who post about technical things, or other musings. If they tweet too much about politics I unfollow them, no matter how important they are otherwise. If you do this, you get a high signal to noise ratio, but Twitter unfortunately lacks in the depth of discussion. And also it's not very social as you say, it's mainly a way for me to listen in on conversations between experts rather than as a way for me to chime in personally.
