Twine: The Geek Review

Posted by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira on March 14th, 2008

Marshall Kirkpatrick's Twine review initially set off my post asking what the perception is of an application's status. It also set off a flurry of buzz about Twine, the private beta from the team at Radar Networks.

I took advantage of our outage yesterday to really spend time poking around in Twine, which defines itself as a semantic web application. I always approach anything that claims it can learn anything about me and provide a true semantic experience, but I'm so desperate for something to help focus my daily reading chore that I'd try just about anything.

Luckily, Twine doesn't fall into the “just about anything” category. It is still an invite-only beta, and in my experience, that still means “testing and missing some features.” It isn't an app you can immediately log into and be up and running in five minutes. If semantic web is still a goal, why do we expect immediate ease of use and no learning curve? We have to assume that semantic web apps are going to do something that isn't currently being done, and as a result, isn't going to look like anything currently being done.

Ramping up on Twine is still a work in progress for me. One issue is definitely a UI issue; If you are like me and tend to use the same userid on every site (with a hyphenate name it's usually easier to stick with a one-word handle), you'll find that your name defaults to the login ID. Most people seem to leave it that way, which makes it more difficult to find people you already know or find interesting.

Twine tries to make this ramp-up faster, but it definitely takes some time. Without many connections or items added (I currently have exactly one connection and 14 items), it doesn't have much information to go on when making recommendations. I stumbled over one Twine only when searching to see if an item had already been added. It does, however, even with the little I added, recommend people to connect with and Twines to join.

However, when it comes to people-powered data relevance, Twine is winning me hands-down over something like Mahalo. Let's face it; people looking for semantic web applications aren't the general web population. We're geeks or information junkies. Twine eliminates the noise you get in things like feeds by allowing you to join Twines and add connections based solely on your interests.

All this seems very complicated, when it fact, once you've spent a little bit of time working with the app, it starts to become intuitive. You can post to Twine via email, a bookmarklet, or right within the app. Once you've added an item, you can share it with contacts, or add it to a Twine that's been set up along a particular subject area. You can also collect items that you find in other Twines for your personal area. The best analogy I've come up with when trying to explain it to someone is that of the organic co-op I used to belong to; It's made up of people with similar interests. Items are categorized based on the aisle set-up (the Twines), and I can pick and choose what I add to my basket. I also put work into the co-op, adding my efforts as well. I think of Twine as a cooperative information exchange.

As Marshall Kirkpatrick's review indicated, it still isn't perfect. The application still doesn't pick up all the keywords in imported content, which Nova Spivack noted in his response to the review. The promised RSS import would be immensely helpful, as would be an overlay with del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia. There are times when I would like to add something to both services, especially while Twine is in private beta and I can't share everything with other interested people who aren't in the beta. But I'm finding that the more I use the app, the more useful it is. I'm looking forward to seeing what it does as it develops more and has a wider user base.

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