@kdfrawg the problem with the Plurk approach is it doesn't handle conversational drift well. Root post starts on Topic X that I don't care about, becomes about Topic Y that I do. Plurk gives me no indication of Topic Y, only Topic X.
The Jaiku approach focused on current conversation with a link to the total thread. You could also mute the conversation as well (maybe something @matigo needs to implement anyway).
It seems like there should be some hybrid of the two approaches, though I'm not sure what that looks like, exactly.