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.
