Why Twine Interests Me

FIRST DRAFT

 

Today I've been thinking about what we are all really doing here. What we are actually building with Twine and why we are participating in it. Twine is part of a trend -- we can feel it -- but what is that trend? What is so important about this?

It's not simply a website, nor is it just "The Semantic Web." Twine is more than that. It is one of the first consumer Semantic Web applications, it is a personal tool, a community tool, a community of communities, an interest network, a recommendation engine, yes. But most importantly, in my opinion, Twine is an example of the next big leap in intelligence.

Then next big leap in intelligence on this planet is not going to happen the way most people think it will. It's not going to arrive in the form of robots, the machines are not suddenly going to become as intelligent as humans someday: Machines will not and cannot become very intelligent on their own.

It's also not going to be a radical advance in individual human intelligence -- human intelligence will not advance much further on its own either, at least not without some new catalyst or environmental pressure.

Instead the next step for the evolution of intelligence is for man and machine to join into collective intelligences that transcends their individual limitations. Together man and machine can form something far more powerful, and far more intelligent, than either on their own, and than anything this world has ever seen.

This is really what Twine is enabling, on a deeper level. This topic of conversation -- about how Twine is enabling collective intelligence and how that is the next leap in evolution for intelligence on this planet -- might not be interesting to the masses, but it's interesting to me and to many others here. And it doesn't matter if the masses find it interesting, they'll find it useful and that is good enough.

What's interesting about Twine as a service is that it combines human and machine intelligence together on both the individual and community levels. In Twine these levels and forms of intelligence work together seamlessly to enable and amplify individual and collective intelligence. There is feedback between the individual and group levels, and between the human minds in Twine and the artificial intelligence behind Twine. Because all of these aspects of Twine are tightly interdependent and interactive they are effectively inseparable. Twine is one big collective mind.

There have been thinking machines in the past that were nothing but blocks of silicon and plastic. Twine is different. Twine is a living breathing thinking machine -- it's a hybrid of man and machine. What makes it really unique is that it is a thinking machine that is partly made of people. And that's why it has so much more potential than all the thinking machines that came before it.

In Twine's collective brain, each person is like a neuron. Each item posted is like a thought, each twine is like a thought process, and the community of all people, items and twines is the collective mind engaged in collective cognition.

In Twine humans and machines collaborate to form a sort of bionic super-intelligence. The humans provide awareness, attention, initiative, creativity, curiosity, understanding and perspective. The machines provide measurement, analysis, memory, learning, linking, search, recall and reasoning. As the humans work together in the foreground to forage for knowledge on the Web and within Twine, and to author content, organize and grow knowledge, and to express opionions and perspectives, and communicate and filter information with one another, the machines work in the background to help organizem, connect, measure, manage, and make sense of it all. The AI in Twine augments human intelligence, and human intelligence augments the AI. Together they exceed their individual horizons.

The AI in Twine is not very smart. But it is just smart enough to automatically tag information, and to learn and make recommendations (virtual links) between things. Twine watches patterns of activity in order to discover the twines, members and items that are most active right now. Twine also learns about the interests of each individual and group, and about content as tags are added and removed, and about the connections between things as items are shared and members connect to one another and join twines.

Soon Twine will also be able to automatically discover clusters of related things around common ideas, and will help members see these clusters and participate in them. And Twine will also allow for new kinds of knowledge to be added in the form of richer semantic authoring and linking, and it will enable richer semantic search on top of all this. Simultaneously Twine will open up to enable thousands of outside applications to add value to its information and capabilities.

But this is just the beginning of what's coming. If we succeed, Twine will become far smarter, both on the human level and the machine level.

Perhaps Twine may even become the smartest place on the Web. If this happens it would be the best place to put information, the best place to do research, the best place to publish, the best place to converse, network, search, advertise, and build community. Why? Because doing these activities inside of Twine would be smarter and more productive than doing them anywhere else.

Of course the notion of "inside Twine" may also go away as Twine's API's enable Twine to provide its functionality to other applications, places and users, outside of the Twine.com domain. If that happens then Twine can actually help to seed the growth of an entire ecosystem.

But today, Twine is still an infant and these dreams seem almost like speculation. It's just starting out on its journey. Its potential collective intelligence has barely started to emerge and coalesce. Yet already Twine is starting to learn and unfold in interesting ways.

In particular, Twine is beginning to guide its own development. It is literally beginning ot program itself. This is happening through feedback between the Twine user community and the Twine development community. The user community in Twine is using Twine to help fix and extend Twine, and to express where they want Twine to go. And the members of the development community are listening and implementing what the user community is asking for. In other words, Twine is starting to redesign Twine.

The collective intelligence within Twine is guiding its own future development and direction. We might call this collectively-generated software. Several observers have remarked on the interesting and unique case-study that Twine's self-guided development presents. The fact that we have so many passionate early-adopters guiding our further development is really powerful and will make Twine into something quite special.

Another unique aspect of Twine, is that it provides ALL of the capabilities that collective intelligences need to really function and advance, in a single unified environment and mental model. Other services provide bits and pieces, here and there, but few really provide it all in one place.

For example the Wikipedia, and wikis in genearl, provide collective memory, and some collective thinking and learning. But recall takes place through Google and there really isn't any collective awareness or attention other than the front page.

Digg and services like Friendfeed and Facebook provide mainly collective awareness and attention with a little bit of collective thinking.

Discussion boards provide just collective thinking.

Google mainly provides collective memory and recall.

Blogging sites -- or rather the blogosphere as a whole -- are also a kind of collective memory, attention and thinking. But other services are needed in order to provide other collective capabilities around it.

These are all interesting environments in their own rights, but what Twine provides is a place where you can do everything a collective mind needs in one place. And the idea is to enable others to not only participate in Twine, but ultimately to build on it too. Twine provides a unified place and platform for collective intelligence.

Twine supports collective memory, collective recall, collective thinking, collective learning, and collective awareness and attention in a single place, and a unified mental model. It all works together seamlessly in one place. And it's in the process of opening up the ontology, data and API's. Sure there is cetainly room for improvement, but those improvements are happening.

My hunch is that because of this, Twine -- the service itself plus the collective intelligence of the humans and the other software applications that will connect with Twine -- may become the smartest community on the Web.

By participating in Twine, each member will have amplified personal capabilities -- both from the automated assistance Twine provides them, and by virtue of their being connected to particular networks of members and twines and able to draw on their resources when needed. Also, each twine -- each group or community -- will have amplified collective intelligence.

It is becoming clear that the next big evolutionary leap for humanity is not going to be a change to our bodies, it is going to be a change to our minds. We are evolving faster on the cognitive plane than the physical one and thanks to advances in technology we are going to become ever more interconnected, interactive, and interdependent -- in the near future there will never be a moment when we are not online.

As this happens the distinction between the individual and the collective will certainly start to blur. It will blur on a physical level because even our bodies will be connected to the network. But it will blur even more on a mental level because our minds will truly become intertwined into collective intelligences online.

As this happens the human collective mind will gradually wake up, become more aware, intelligent, experienced, capable, and mature. This is a highly optimistic, hopeful vision for the future. A vision where humanity wakes up and becomes more intelligent and whole.

Twine is on the frontlines of this evolutionary shift to higher collective intelligence. That's important work. Exciting work. In my opinion, this is the real importance of Twine, and this is much more significant than even the Semantic Web aspects of our story. If we can grow Twine into the smartest place on the Web, we will be able to lead the whole Web, and the whole world, in that direction.

The members of this community are among the revolutionaries who are helping to spearhead this frontier. We all have a sense of what is possible with Twine. And we're itching for it to happen as fast as possible. We not only need these capabilities for ourselves, we know that everyone does or soon will, whether they know it yet or not. We can sense how this has the potential to make us smarter and more effective as individuals, but also as groups and communities. There is already a collective vision and it is gaining momentum. This is the stuff that memes are made of.

Perhaps, if all goes incredibly well, we will all be able to look back at these early days of Twine and say "I was there from the start. I helped make that."