Ewan recently mentioned finding friendfeed useful, if occasionally overwhelmed by twitter posts. Usefully it does roll up multiple posts into one entry where appropriate. 

Friendfeed offers a nice way to provide a composite feed which summarises a list of when and where your friends have posted new content elsewhere on the web.   It is sort of like an outward facing Facebook newsfeed.  Instead of just providing a list of actions within the facebook service, this draws on any web2.0 services which you post. It can provide a composite list of what you or your friends have been up to and where they have been posting recently. There are so many places where people may be posting that it can be difficult to keep up, and spot and add new feeds for everyone. 

Bother, I had spent a long time programming and linking up a cunning sequence of yahoo pipes to do exactly this job

EDIT: fixed the link to my friend feed and also posted a new item about filtering facebook to remove twitter.  Wonder if this will help ewan's problem?