Twine

May 9, 2008

Twine I feel like I’m coming in way too early with a review of Twine, but I wanted to give a beginner’s perspective on the service. And since I’ve been using it for three weeks, it’s high time I gave my “beginner’s perspective.”

A lot of the reason I’ve waited so long has to do with the fact that Twine is a service that is rooted in experience: therefore, the longer you use it the better it gets. And, I wanted to be fair with my review.

Twine trumpets itself as one of the first “semantic” web applications. Semantic, when you’re talking about web software, has a lot behind it right now. It’s being heralded as the underlying technology of web 3.0.

“Web 3.0? What the heck is that? Who cares what version of the web application world we’re in?”

I completely agree; but, you should know that Web Semantics is the newest internet software philosophy.

Semantic software is all about making the software understand the language. In other words, if you tell a search engine to look for hillary clinton, instead of searching for the two words “hillary” and “clinton,” a semantic search engine would search for references to the person Hillary Clinton.

The idea is to make the software smarter and, therefore, easier to use.

Twine sits on top of web semantics, and although it isn’t perfect the whispers of a better internet can be heard when using it.

Here’s what Twine does:
Twine Bookmarklet

Provides a javascript bookmark for collecting links - The bookmark can be hit on any page and a link is created in your personal twine.
Auto fills titles, tags, and descriptions - This is the real power of Twine, it takes all the manual labor out of the user’s hands and does the grunt work itself.
Provides a repository for collecting links and notes - A trip to Twine gives you access to all of your content.
Allows sharing of links and notes with other users - You can join other “twines” in order to share content with other users. The twines divide content into categories. So, for example, I joined a “zombie” twine where I can search existing content and add to the content with my own links and information directly related to zombies.
Makes all of your content searchable - This is one of the big promises of the semantic web: having searches that give you only the information you’re looking for. After a few hiccups (see the problems below) the search seems to work as advertised.

Throw in the fact that it also analyzes your content and cross compares it to others in order to provide you with more content that is relevant to your interests, and it sounds like a pretty great service.

And, it is. I’ve begun using it more and more. Usually, when I have to install a bookmark in order to use a service, I quickly forget about it - but, twine is different. The reason I can bring myself to use the twine “bookmarklet” is that it is so easy to use. It fills in all of the content for me! It’s a lazy web-surfers paradise.

With all of that said, there are a couple of down sides to Twine.

It’s hard to understand - This is, by far, Twine’s biggest problem. Even having a good idea about what the semantic web dream is, I had trouble discerning the purpose and usefulness of Twine. It took a week and a half of me forcing myself to use it before I started to derive benefit from it.
Problems with search - The first week I used Twine, the search didn’t work for me at all. I don’t know what changed, but when search finally started working for me it made up for the problems. It’s now nearly flawless.

Twine is in extremely-private-beta right now, it’s what they’re calling a “true beta,” so it takes a little time to get an invitation, but if you get the opportunity to try it out in its early stages you should.

All in all, I’m very excited about the final product. If it works this well in beta I can’t wait to see what it’ll be capable of in final release.

Related Posts:
Why I Migrated over to Twine

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under reviews