Of course you had to know about the @ feature. It took some time for me to understand it though.

As to the influx of people it simply meant that I moved from the public timeline to the private one, where you see those you follow rather than the hundreds of thousands of other users.

I like that there are so many people and that's the reason I haven't moved to another service. The sense of community here is strong and I've met many of the London tweeters in person, at least for London.

With facebook it was about people you knew from the physical world. With twitter it was about meeting people online, getting to know them over a period of weeks and finally meeting them in person.

Part of this process was made easier by getting the sms to the phone rather than being online all the time.