[effigies]

Personally, I don't use it to stay informed. I don't think it's well designed for that purpose. While there are many people/companies who update their twitters with new product information or blog posts, it's all too specific and in order to get a good spread of updates, you'd be opening up a crapflood, and I have little inclination to filter it myself.

I use it to keep up with what's happening with people I know, a couple humorous feeds (e.g. @fakeapstylebook, @shitmydadsays), and authors who are writing books I want to read.

Also, there are a couple people I follow who tend to post links of interest to me (at the moment, @donsbot and @bos31337, as I'm currently obsessed with Haskell), and they don't post frequently enough to pollute my feed with their lives.