The entrepreneur-turned-venture capitalist Mark Suster tweeted Why I Unfollowed You On Twitter, a blog post by Ian Rogers of Topspin. "I want Twitter to be for news and information from trusted sources. My dream is that I open Twitter and can quickly consume 15-20 interesting stories from around the Web, curated for me by people who know how to sort the wheat from the chaff. I want high signal, low noise."
He plans to follow people he actually knows on Facebook, and professional contacts at LinkedIn.
It's exactly what I've been saying for years: curate your various social web networks to deliver value.
Deriving value is a function of what the network and platform does best, and who you know (of) and who you want to know and what you want to know about.
That includes not following friends or other known entities on Twitter unless what they tweet is justifiably interesting to you.
It's been my policy on Twitter for the past five years. In fact, I rarely follow newcomers on Twitter -- even if they're a personality I find extremely intriguing because I recognize there's a learning curve and it can take a VERY long time before a person starts tweeting value.
I'll follow later since a timeline filled with irrelevancies is not what I'm looking for right now, or ever. I also use Twitter lists to store potential accounts to follow in my main feed.