Twine
I don’t yet know what to make of Twine, but the Talis blog has a short overview with a number of links.
Twine seems to be a practical answer to the question of what semantic web technologies can add to the social networking experience. This overview explains among other things that:
The interface also includes a tag cloud for quick reference. Radar Networks’ platform has digested Wikipedia as part of its underlying structure, and has 300,000 concepts in the system.
So it seems that this might be a smarter and more open alternative to something like Facebook (which I still don’t get), but which is deeply and richly integrated into the web, and no doubt the emerging web of data. The links of the tagging infrastructure to Wikipedia is just a simple, but practical, example of this. I’ll be interested to see what the Zotero guys think of this as they work on their server and social networking stuff.
update: Tim O’Reilly explains Twine like so:
Underlying twine is Radar’s semantic engine, trained to do what is called entity extraction from documents. Put in plain language, the semantic engine auto-tags each document, turning each entity into what looks like a web link as well as a tag in the sidebar. Type a note in twine, and it picks out all of the people, places, companies, books, and other types of information contained in the note, separating them out by type.
Also, Shelley Powers has a really good point on a potential drawback:
… the semantic web means the web in the wild, not centralized in a specific tool or environment. If this becomes a “Facebook and Wikipedia mashup”, it might be successful, and it might be semantic, but it isn’t the web. The whole point of the semantic web technologies is for each of us to annotate our data, wherever we are, regardless of tool, and begin to really drive out the tiny threads of true meaning on a global scale. If we have to leave our places where we’re at and go elsewhere, this seems to create a disconnect, right from the start. I have this same quibble with the other ‘mainstream applications using semantic web technologies’, so the concern isn’t targeted specifically at Twine.
