Pretty sure it's a mind set change. Just dip in and dip out, don't try and catch up on everything.

I think for a single tech platform to enable a community to grow through what are obviously different phases of community growth it needs to evolve with the community. How it does that I'm not sure but I imagine you end up enabling a lot of the feature fb supports.

1-1 private chat
1-n private chat
1-n public chat (groups)
1-* public chat (statuses)

At some point though, the noise must get too much so allowing people to selectively filter out noise (and automatically doing it) becomes a must.