Unless I'm misunderstanding how it works, I browse Hubski a great deal through the Chatter page, scrolling down and reading content first, usernames later and if anything catches my eye, clicking through to the discussion. This brings me into contact with many more people than following or tags might.
i wish chatter had an RSS feed so i could passively monitor it. hey mk, how feasible is this? reddit has a similar feature, and it's actually pretty great http://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments and http://www.reddit.com/r/all/comments.xml etc perhaps some ajax to automatically prepend to the top of the feed would be appropriate as well.
I love chatter. I wish everyone would use it. For the initiated, it allows users to kind of check out what people they follow are discussing without having to click through to each article. Also it may allow you to see posts that aren't in your feed, but that may be interesting.
I'd quite like a 'Zen' version of chatter which doesn't display the username, the comment's hubwheel or the thread, allowing me to contemplate just the words and click through if I'm drawn in.