We’ve been excited about the prospect of Radar Network’s web app Twine for some time. The application, still in an early beta version, finally opened to press tonight (but not the general public), so I’ve been testing it out for a first-impressions review.
Twine is intended to help its users collect and organize information, acting as a sort of semi-intelligent personal encyclopedia. It’s based on heavy-duty semantic tech developed in-house by Radar — but since it’s open for use, I can stop talking about the underlying technology and focus in on the actual product.
To state that another way: Now that real semantic applications are finally appearing, it’s time to stop talking about how they work and start talking about what they do — and where they could fit into the web ecosystem.
As I said, Twine is a sort of self-constructed encyclopedia, but its real power comes from users who make their profile public, or even open for collaboration with others. In the profiles, users can share information like news articles, documents or videos. The shared items have short (if not quite Twitter-short) summaries, quick and easy to glance over. But when you want to look deeper, there’s much more information, all linked and cross-referenced just as Wikipedia is. In addition, there are tagged sidebars leading off to related topics.
For an example of the tagging, consider a couple documents I put in about two startups. I didn’t bother adding more than a couple manual tags. Twine went through and auto-tagged some words on its own, including “startups”. Clicking on that word took me to a list that included another, related document I’d uploaded, as well as a surprisingly sizable — considering how little information is on Twine so far — and accurate list of articles and comments on startups other users had added. If I’d instead clicked on a tag of a specific thing, like San Francisco, the results would have been even more targeted.
In fact, it’s the tagging that Twine revolves around. Take a look at the image to the right — it’s a list of some 30 tags, sucked out of12 documents and articles I added into Twine. And those tags aren’t all that were picked up — they’re just the ones Twine found most relevant, with the most important clearly visible. More tags reside within individual item pages.
Because of its sharing tools, Twine is like Twitter, Del.icio.us and any number of other current web apps: Good for notifying others of what you’re looking at and what’s useful.
However, it’s also got a memory and some limited ability to “think” by cross-relating all of its accumulated information, so Twine strikes me as a potentially great research tool. That’s in line with something founder Nova Spivak told me a few months back, that information-overloaded professionals like engineers, investors, journalists and lawyers are the target audience.
But now some caveats. The user interface needs some serious work to make the process of pawing through saved items much faster. Auto-tagging is also still fairly unreliable, with errors popping up like one I found when adding a San Jose Mercury News article, from which Twine ended up pulling in tags from unrelated stories.
Such problems are caused in part by the chaotic array of different designs and standards on the Internet, but ironing out the glitches is entirely up to the team at Radar. At some point, they need to create a break-even point for widespread adoption: The amount of work users put into building their Twine must be far lower than the value of information that’s fed back, in a convenient and intelligent form.
I’m confident the engineers at Radar can handle the difficulties, but there are several other semantic and natural-language startups hot on their heels, most still in stealth mode. This should be an exciting year for new applications in this area, and I’ll be reporting on more soon. In the meantime, look out for Twine to start opening to the public this month (more about that here, along with some funding info).
6 Comments
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william said:
Twine seems to me to be a very good idea, and the appear to be executing on their vision.
One thing that I m wondering about is do I want to give information to a semantic product that is not open source.
What will happen if Twine does something that allows advertisers to have access to my information with out my approval. Are there any access rules in Twine that would allow me to say who can and cannot have my information.
What would happen if Twine were about to be purchased by Microsoft or Google and because of this I wanted to leave the service……I could leave the service….but because it is not Open Source I would not have anywhere to go….Open Source keeps companies honest and gives developers and members the possibility of having another option…. -
Nova Spivack said:
Twine will be an advertising supported service at some point, and thus we will make use of our graph to provide highly relevant advertising to users. In this respect Twine will not be unlike Google or any other business that makes use of a graph, Web page context, or user behavior data to target ads. However we will NOT be handing advertisers personal or private data about any user. Your private data is PRIVATE. It’s yours. We want to give you recommendations and other utility around what you teach us about your interests, but that’s all. As for being able to get your data out — the software doesn’t have to be open source to enable this. We simply have to provide API’s where you can get your data out in open standard based ontologies. This makes your data portable to other applications and reusable outside of Twine. And that is exactly what we will be doing.
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peter royal said:
@william .. you can get your data out, http://www.twine.com/tour/semantic
there are a lot tools out there now and under development for working with semantic data. you won’t have the twine user interface, but you can use the same data.
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Sam I Am said:
Twine could very easily be the first Web 3.0 company spawned. It combines the power of both web 1.0 and the social graph-ing of web 2.0. If they get it right, it might well be the first breakout hit of the next cycle.
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David Scott Lewis said:
@Sam I Am, you’re absolutely right. I’ve been the most active Twinerian private beta tester and can tell you unequivocally that Twine is the first Web 3.0 company, although it’s really much more than a mere generational advance from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. Hence, I don’t like the Web 3.0 moniker for Twine; to me, Web 3.0 understates Twine. Humility is a good thing, but a Web 3.0 moniker doesn’t give the whole story, just part of it.
@Chris: First, welcome to Twine … and I’m delighted that we’re connected. Please be sure to give my regards to Dean. Second, great “preview” — because this piece is more like a “preview” than a “review”. You grasped the essence of Twine rather quickly. However, let me challenge you on one very important (and potentially misleading) statement: “… some limited ability to “think” by cross-relating all of its accumulated information.” Limited? Not true. I would argue that this practically(-speaking) unlimited ability to think is one of Twine’s key strengths and sustainable competitive advantages. And it’s this “thinking” that makes recommendations made by Twine a cut above anything else on the market. It’s a semweb recommender, not your father’s recommender: It’s way, way beyond “standard” collaborative filtering.
Some of us in the private beta and in a couple of the restricted Twines (Twine Product Community and Twine Evangelism, which I manage) have joked that Twine isn’t quite “artificial intelligence,” but it’s “social software smarts”. Twine isn’t HAL (as in HAL-9000), but it’s not your everyday recommendation system or social network or wiki or threaded online discussion group platform or social bookmarking system, either. It’s ALL of these … and more. Stay tuned …
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Adam Lindemann said:
Hi we have invested in a company called Imindi which I think you may find of interest. If Twine is about helping the individual and the group with organising their information using objective semantics, Imindi is about helping the individual and group with expanding their thoughts and extending their mind using organic and subjective semantics.
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