Can Twitter Serve as a Personal Knowledge Management Tool?

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?

Comments

[Sean Brady]

I am using Twitter Search, FeedBurner and Gmail to help me better manage my links and RT's in Twitter. I use Gmail as my PKM nerve center (as suggested in a number of posts on the Micro Persuasion blog), and actually have FeedBurner e-mail me whenever I have new link content. My search on Twitter Search is pretty simple, just from:seanabrady filter:links.

This works well for me as I also have feeds coming in from Google Reader, my Friendfeed and Diigo.

[jonathan denison]

I think I use twitter for personal KM :) It is the end repository that get's all the stuff I care about. My set up is as follows;

I use delicious when I am browsing and find something I like
Google reader and the share button for blogs I read which are helpful
Flickr (mainly personally for photos)
Twitter from time to time to tweet directly
I blog occasionally
And I use Evernote to share stuff publically from time to time.

All these feed into friendfeed and from their out to twitter.

So either friendfeed or twitter are my repository where I can go back and search in one place if I don't recall where I came across something.

Is this personal KM?

[bill Ives]

Sean and Jonathan Thanks for sharing your social media use for personal KM. It is more comprehensive than what I do see my Enterprise 2.0 for Enterprise of One series on this blog. http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2009/03/enterprise-20-for-an-enterprise-of-one-part-five-content-publishing-and-archiving.html Bill

[Dirk Röhrborn]

I'm using www.communote.com for my personal knowledge management. This is a microsharing system made for enterprise use. However, what I like is the powerful #-tagging and filtering that serves my purposes for storing and remembering snippets of knowledge best.

[bill Ives]

Dirk Thanks for the suggestion. I will take a look at it. Bill

[Sim Hua Soon]

I think you have raised a valid point that Twitter reminds you of de.licio.us

While Twitter is definitely good in dissemination of information, I doubt it will be useful for long term personal knowledge management.

As the amount of information increases, it will be harder to retrieve what you want. There is a limit on the amount of information that can be stored with 160 characters. There is a scientific word for this - entropy

There are a lot of meta-information that is required for a feasible large-scale knowledge base. One good example will be emails to illustrate what Twitter is currently lacking.

* Who - source or participants of the information
* When - When was this information created
* Context - as in previous emails discussion. Can we link up all the threads on twitter?
* organization structure - as in email folders or tags

[bill Ives]

Sim Hua - Thanks for your comment. I agree with your points. I use twitter as a short term storage for useful links. However, I need to go back to them within a week or it can get hard to find stuff as you suggest. I also use email in the manner you suggest.

Bill