I've never met the author of the article, but I assume he's the type of person who is bothered when his Reader unread tally switches over to the plus mark. I mean, honestly, tweets are 140 characters or less. The average tweet takes a handful of seconds to read. Is my time so important that I can't spend a few minutes of my day learning what my friends thought was important to share with me? Must I tailor their inter…
If you are looking for harbingers and early insights they typically have a weak signal, so you have to sift through quite a lot of content / message traffic to find them.
Your use case is fine, it's just not the author's.