Twitter has never made a compelling case for "regular people". The reality is that if you don't have a lot of followers the experience on Twitter isn't very compelling. You see lots of tweets from celebrities you follow but you don't see everything because the stream passes too quickly. You never tweet yourself because on the few occassions you did no one responded (you have 50 followers who either don't use the service often or when they do have the same stream overflow problem you have).

Twitter should seriously consider making people you interact with get precedent in the timeline. That would allow you to see tweets from people you know IRL easier and make interaction more common.