Is Twitter a waste of time? It obviously depends on the tweeting habits of who you chose to follow. Luckily there is freedom of clicking that unfollow button, block specific clients or hashtags, select lists, etc. To make it short there are many ways to filter a redundant feed to meet your needs.
But here comes the point I would like to make: even if you select the best accounts to follow and set up a couple of filtering strategies, tweets can nonetheless be repetitive and redundant.
If a buzz goes viral, your feed will literally be overwhelmed by repetitive content. The latest example is the news that Google Health is shutting down. Many of the users I follow have shared a link from TechCrunch or NYTimes. I might have read it 10 - 20 times.
This made me think whether retweeting or sharing myself the news would be useful to my followers or just another tweet in the crowd (or cloud), a waste of time, since other 100 people might have done the same before me.
Is sharing a link on twitter of any value? If you are interested in a specific topic, you can indeed get the important news by other means. For example I am subscribed to the FDA newsletter. Several days after I have read in my mailbox of a new approved treatment, punctually I read on twitter links to the same news, over and over again.
It is true that repetita juvant, but this repetition links can indeed make twitter a waste of time.
This is why I truly believe Diigo can enhance everyone's twitter sharing and learning experience. I've been a member since June 2009 and I've seen this service literally growing from a delicious-like bookmark tool, to a social knowledge platform with great potentials.
What I think is that if you share a link, you might as well effortlessly "add something of your own". Diigo's browser extensions make it really simple to highlight and add notes to web pages. This video illustrates this:
Instead of just posting a link on twitter, with Diigo you can share your highlights and notes in a time efficient way.
For example this is how I've shared the Google Health news on the NYTimes: http://diigo.com/0i24p
I believe using Diigo this way can enhance everyone's twitter experience and contribute to create an efficient knowledge sharing community.
