Twine and Knowledge Management - I started my beta test yesterday and wow!

On Sunday, whilst catching up on my favourite blogs, I read 'Do you want early access to the Twine beta', from Nova Spivak, at Radar Networks.

As I have been following Twine for a while, it really was no problem for me to blog why I wanted an early access, which was the condition Nova had set, and then email him.

I hoped for a reply sometime in the following week.

Two hours later, I received a reply from Nova from his Blackberry!
"Thanks, nice to meet you - we will let you in next week"
That's extraordinary service.

Yesterday, Wednesday morning, I was let in to Twine.

Three hours later I had created three Twines of my own. I thought I had better keep them private, and not make a fool of myself, until I understood what Twine was really about and how to use it properly. Well I needn't have worried. It is quite intuitive.

In just one hour I had added into my first Twine, which is a project with a small team that started three months ago, all the associated team emails, an MS Powerpoint presentation, an Excel spreadsheet, several Word documents, my Blog, several Websites and some notes.

That alone made me feel better organised. Especially having the emails for the project all together in one place. (Twine allocates an email address for each Twine, so you can email them in).

Next thing I know, Twine reads all of this and starts to auto-tag. It starts to tell me the 'people' it came across in the project, the 'organisations', the 'places' and 'other tags' or concepts too. Already the list is impressive. If Twine gets better at learning what your interests are, the more you use it, and I get results within a couple of hours from 49 items, I cannot wait to see more.

The sad thing is that I now have to go to some intense project meetings for a couple of days, and I will not be able to get to know Twine better until I return. But I will be able to find time to show the people I am meeting what Twine already knows about them, and the project, after a couple of hours!

I feel much more organised too! I think tools like Twine are starting to show us what Web 3.0 is really about. I am pretty sure that my personal and team knowledge management work practices are in for a radical change!

So far, I have had extraordinary service from Nova Spivak, and an extraordinary experience in starting to use Twine.

Much more on my beta testing of Twine later.

It's certainly worth following Twine. Check it out and please let me know what you think.


Ron Young

www.knowledge-management-online.com