It was about five months ago when I decided to jump into the world of twitter and since then twitter has become for me a sort of proxy for listening and chatting at the “watercooler” (at ensemble it was really the coffee maker).  I am naturally a sort of internet lurker, tending to silently listen in to conversations more often than following people and taking part.
I have actively not followed a large number of people, instead I followed a small number of people and enabled the see all replies options. This allowed me to see all (but direct messages) people I elected to follow were sending, even if it was a reply to a message sent to them that I did not see.  Often a reply from a friend to someone I did not know would lead me to a new person, maybe one I might even follow.
Well, I apparently have been doing it wrong.
Twitter (the company) does not want me to see replies to people I don’t follow, even if they are from people I am following; at least that is how I understand the latest change to the system.  I guess they instead want me to follow, what I feel is a vastly high number of people simple to see chatter.
Thankfully applications, such as tweet deck are available. It will allow me to hide the masses of these new followers I am going to be forced to pick up, while displaying messages from those I “really” want to follow.
That is unless twitter decides to return back to its users the option to see all @s.
Update:
It looks like Twitter heard some of our pleas and has decided to make a few changes.  I can understand them needing to be able to get a handle on the amount of traffic they would be pushing if everyone had decided to enable the all replies option, and am happy with their proposed changes.