First off, what is twistory? Twistory is a twitter mashup that gives you a view of the backlog of your tweets, but with a twist. Your tweet history can be added to most online and desktop calendars. Setting up an ical or Google calendar is as simple as clicking on a button. On top of creating an archive of your tweets that goes back as far as you like, it also creates a visual display of your tweet activity that can provide insight into your use of twitter as an individual or organization.

Screengrab of twistory in Google calendar. (Click to enlarge.)

Here are 3 reasons I think businesses should employ this simple tool.

1) It’s hard to make, or at least realize, improvements in any skill unless you have a baseline to measure your current activity against. This includes your writing and engagement in social platforms like twitter. Twistory gives you the ability look back at your early tweeting activity and measure your improved use. I think this may be bigger than people realize.

2) I tweet my thoughts (every once in a while something intelligent) and sometimes those thoughts are kernels of much bigger ideas that I might want to capture in a blog post or article. The archive allows me to scan through everything I thought was tweet worthy, including links to sites I might need to visit again, in a very user friendly and familiar week by week view.

3) Using a shared calendar, such as Google, an organization could use twistory to pull everyone’s tweets together on a timeline for easy viewing and monitoring as well as (if this met your objectives) scheduling. If you use twitter to provide customer support this might be a way to collect somewhat common questions and answers for training and static content placement.

There’s something about the visual presentation of data that makes it immediately more useful to me.

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