Excellent post. I was surprised, however that to use your fishing analogy, you didn't highlight the need for a good "Fish Finder" -- vis a vis http://search.twitter.com as you know is best implemented in TweetDeck. The ability to scan the public timeline for interesting conversation by folks you are *not* following is extremely powerful.

Readers, if you haven't tried it, click on this to see what people are saying about GoGrid

I use it to reach out to anyone talking about Splunk. If they say "splunk sucks" i try to help and figure out why, if they say "splunk rules" i usually kudo them and send out schwag. I also track all activity on the Mac application "quicksilver" as its an interesting hobby of mine, and i send new new users my quicksilver productivity video

I just had to say "vis a vis".. because its so awesome to say "vis a vis"