Maybe it’s because I’m old. Therefore, I have to reduce new things I encounter to simple, sensible, analogies that my addled brain can understand. But here it is…
I don’t see Micro.blog as a social network.
I see it as a collection/aggregation of blogs. Therefore, in this context, replies are comments on those blog posts. That means the Micro.blog Timeline is essentially an RSS feed of the blog posts and related comments on those posts.
With that view in mind, the Micro.blog Timeline is made of simply what the people on Micro.blog choose to write about on their blogs and how others choose to respond to those subjects.
If you find something missing, like “News”, that’s not the fault of Micro.blog. That is simply because the people on the service are choosing not to write about such up-to-the-minute “breaking” current events and thus there’s nothing for others to respond to.
Maybe there are subjects you wish were more represented on your timeline or like-minded people you’d like to find. Well, search could be better, yes, but/and we on Micro.blog could all be doing a more active job getting those folks we might know in our circles onto and using Micro.blog and follow them so that we see them on our timeline.
If it is missing anything, it is the wealth of perspectives and subject depth that comes from a large diverse pool of active users who are willing to post about a variety of topics. And that’s something that can only come through time and the intangible nature of popularity (i.e. more people using it).
Though Micro.blog is not a social network in my mind, I will state that even Twitter in its earliest days was mainly people posting about their work projects and their lunch. The news, politics, activism, and other things came later.
Micro.blog is what the users of Micro.blog make Micro.blog.