Twitter Overload

I set out to follow #ldsconf. I'd never used Twitter, so I had to experiment to find a working solution.  The fist site I tried became unresponsive; it probably had server problems. Then I tried Twitter itself and learned that you can't follow hash tags automatically. So then I tried another aggregator. That one held up under load, but it didn't allow any speed controls on the feed. Tweets came pouring in and the screen flickered at a seizure-inducing rate.  Unable to read that fast, I tried one more service. It kept the refresh rate to two minutes and gradually let new tweets in. Despite changing feeds several times, I managed to follow quite a bit on Twitter; I don't think any of it was very important compared to the live talks.  I feel like I missed important messages because I split my attention too much.