When I first heard about Twine, my reaction was ‘Ho-Hum, another social web service’. Twine was in private Beta for a year with a claim of “the first mainstream Semantic Web application”. Ever since I have discovered it, that feeling has been replaced with ‘Hey, there could be something big here’. ‘Could’ being the operative word. What is Twine? It is an online, social web service for information storage, authoring and discovery. Simply put it is an easy way to keep track of your interests beyond news articles.
What makes it potentially big is the broad sweep of interests and the use of Semantic Web. Simply put, it can automatically learn about your interests and uses that to makes connections as well as suggests recommendations. Hence, the more you use it, the more it becomes useful to you.
The Top 100 Twines (or topics) include: Science Discoveries, Green Business Investing, Sustainable Development, User Interface Design and so on. Once you join a Twine sharing articles or posting items is easy – through a bookmarklet or email. I have begun to use Twine – and have started a Twine on Advertising & Creativity.
You might say that it is similar to a Facebook Group or Delicious but the simplicity, focus and personalization of Twine makes it different. It has the potential to go beyond sharing bookmarks through tags – taking into account the people you follow, the stories you recommend and the twines you join. And the Twine topics are slightly more evolved than some of the Facebook Group topics! Speaking of which, while both Facebook & LinkedIn have groups my activity in these groups (and I have joined several) is abysmally low. Since the focus of Twine is Group Activity through shared interests I am likely to be more active there. So, let’s inter-Twine?
2 Comments
hmmm…. have been hearing oohs and poohs, have still not tried it đ but any idea on the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ vis-a-vis friendfeed?
Manu, I discovered FriendFeed recently. Off the cuff the difference seems to be in the interface (I found Twine to be better). The Twine topics seem lofty and also easier to find. Either way, my usage on both has dropped considerably because of the sheer volume of info that is already available and ‘waiting to be read’. Since you are more into such Social Media stuff, which one do you live mostly on?