The #FASTForward Blog » What #Twitter Needs to do for Personal Knowledge Management: Enterprise 2.0

What Twitter Needs to do for Personal Knowledge Management

by Bill Ives

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 its 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 my 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?