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?
