I had this in mind with some earlier sidebar mockups — at one point we had a separate Users and Groups headings in the sidebar (the idea for V1 was that these would just be links to /u or /g).
We’ve since consolidated and put these links under the Community section, but the idea was that these would eventually be extended by plugins to work similarly to the categories/tags sections.
So for “Users” we’d show the users you’re following, have a little count to show when they’ve posted content, and on click you’d see their new activity. We’d also have a All following link at the bottom to see the consolidated list (/my/follow/feed).
Personally I’d like a little more optional flexibility for follow notifications through this too — at the moment you get notified when someone you follow posts new content, but it would be nice to have the option to not get a full user-menu notification, but just a count in the sidebar.