Using Your Twitter Page As A Knowledge Management System

By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-05-28

Personal knowledge management can be very useful and when it is social it can serve many purposes. Can twitter serve this function?

Here is an interesting post from Andre Yee at eBizQ, Is Twitter's Growth Sustainable? He raises four issues: attrition, demographics, user experience and usage patterns, and monetization. I think that each of these are real concerns. However, I think the key in number three: user experience and usage patterns. If they get this right the others will take care of themselves.

Andre points out that "Facebook, MySpace and other social networks have a richer user experience beyond broadcasting. This means additional usage patterns and these translate to greater user affinity and stickiness." The simplicity of Twitter is a large part of tits power. However, I think there needs to be more for sustainability. One part is the actual interface itself, as TweetDeck has proven.

Another part is the ability to use Twitter as a personal knowledge management system. I do this with this blog so I naturally started doing this with Twitter. I tweet or retweet links to things I want to go back to. Since it is Twitter, a social tool, I am also sharing them but in many cases that is secondary. Twitter does the social part fairly well. But the archive part is very primitive. It reminds me of del.icio.us. Once I got a few hundred links it became clumsy and I stopped using it.

Do you use Twitter for personal knowledge management? How do you think it can improve in this area? Are their third party apps that help here?

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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.