I heard this in a podcast this morning. Everyone is important – because everyone can be a source for something. You might not know when they will be a source for something, but everyone can be.
I don’t think that they meant that we need to just collect people just so that we can have more people following us on twitter. It’s not about having a ton of people as much as it focuses on the importance of every person that is in your community or your twitter list.
The further I go in education, the more you start realizing that that the combined wisdom of any collaborative effort is much better than anything that I can do on my own.
It’s not a bad perspective to have of the people on your friend list. Everyone is source of something.
Oh-and I heard it off of @mitchjoel and his podcast – Media Hacks #33. Check it out.
identitySPECIALIST 
You know, I’ve always hated the word ‘networking’ specifically because it refers to something that’s so shallow and ultimately unfriendly (really just a bit of a ‘use’). However, I do teach my students that everyone has something to offer, sometimes you just have to be patient enough to see what. If we weren’t listening to other people’s stories/advice/whatever and we weren’t caring about what they had to offer, then we’d ultimately become so self-centered as to be both deaf and blind to all the resources surrounding us.