Description Click to Edit

Question: What is Twine for? How Should I Use It?

First of all, the purpose of Twine is not to help you search. Rather it is to gather content and keep up with what's new around your interests.

 

Interest Networking

Twine is for "interest networking" rather than "social networking." In social networks you keep up with your friends, but in Twine you keep up with your interests.

Your interests may include your friends, but they also include much more -- hobbies, products, companies, places and travel, your profession or industry, health issues, family, projects, entertainment, events, and many other topics. Keeping up with, and sharing, content around interests is what Twine is all about.

To learn more about Interest Networking, join the Interest Networks twine. http://www.twine.com/twine/11v7px1nw-qh/interest-networking.

For general discussion about the concept of "the wisdom of crowds" see: http://www.twine.com/twine/11vsjx3d1-tz/the-wisdom-of-crowds

 

What is a "twine" and What are twines for?

In Twine, you join public or private groups called "twines" that are focused on specific interests. Twines are places for sharing and discussing content and knowledge around an interest, with groups of other like-minded people.

In twines you can leverage the wisdom of crowds to collaboratively collect content, track interests and keep up with what's new. You can also author and add your own original content to twines. Instead of having to do all the work of keeping up with your interests yourself, you can team-up with others who share your passion to scour the Web for the best stuff and grow shared knowledge together.

Your Interest Feed is the Center of Your Life on Twine

Your Interest Feed is the center of your life on Twine -- it is where everything comes together in one place and where you can see what's new with all your interests.

Your Interest Feed appears on your home page in Twine.

Whenever someone adds something new or comments in a twine you belong to you will get notified on your home page Interest Feed. So go ahead and join a bunch of twines about your interests, and then use your Interest Feed to keep up what's new in one place.

You can control which of your twines appear in your Interest Feed using the Account: Twine Settings tab.

http://www.twine.com/account/subscriptions

Managing Your Stuff

You can also manage your own private stuff in Twine -- everything you have added, shared, received from others is aggregated in the My Items section: http://www.twine.com/my-items-all

Soon you will also be able to import bookmarks and other content into Twine so you can keep everything in one place, find it easily, and share things selectively with ohters.

Social Networking in Twine

Twine has simple social networking features built-in. You can see your social network in Twine in your My Connections area.

You can invite your friends to Twine by email, and you can connect to existing members in Twine. You can share with anyone you are connected to -- but you cannot share with people you are not connected to.

You can exchange private messages with your Connections in Twine. Twine will send emails between you and them on your behalf.

Searching

You can search Twine using the search bar. This enables you to find content around specific interests in any twines you belong to, or that are public.

Twine's search features enable simple semantic search -- you can drill down semantically using the Filter bar on the left margin to find semantically related content.

Twine search only searches the content that is inside of Twine -- content contributed by users or mined by Twine around that content. This is higher "signal-to-noise" content than what is found on the open Web -- it's just the best stuff, the stuff that users with strong interests felt was important to read.

The purpose of Twine is really less about search and more about "discovery" -- finding new interesting things that match your interests -- than search. For general search, we recommend Google!

Twine Automatically Adds Semantic Tags

One of the ways Twine adds value to your content is by auto-tagging it. Any content you add to Twine is analyzed using natural language understanding to generate tags for you automatically. The tags appear on the right of the item detail page.

There are different tag panes for place tags, people tags, organization tags, and other tags. You can enter tags into these panes on any item that you have write-permission on.

Tags appear in 2 colors -- blue or orange. The blue tags are from the original content's tags or were tags entered by Twine users. Orange colored tags were detected by Twine's natural language analysis.

Auto-tagging saves you time and generates better, richer tags. But it's still a work in progress. The value of auto-tags can be seen when searching. You can filter your searches to find results with semantic tags for related places, people, organizations or other topics.

Twine Automatically Crawls for Related Content

Many Twine users don't know this, but in fact, Twine does research around your interests automatically to help you gather related content.

For example, if you add content to Twine that contains URLs, Twine will attempt to crawl and pull in the content of those URLs and link them to your content automatically.

To test this, copy and paste the content of a Wikipedia page into a new Note and then save it. Notice at the bottom of the resulting item that there are a whole bunch of links to related pages -- these pages were crawled and automatically generated for you by Twine.

Recommendations and Discovery

One of the main goals of Twine is to help users with content discovery. Twine helps you discover new content that relates to your interests.

As you use Twine, adding content, joining twines, connecting with people, sharing, etc., the system begins to learn about your interests using artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web.

Based on this learning, Twine starts to make personalized recommendations for you about other people, twines and content items you may want to check out.

Using the Explore Page to Find New Twines to Join

The Explore page is where you can see the big picture in Twine. It's important to try it out. http://www.twine.com/explore

The Explore page lets you see the Top 100 most active twines, and also the new twines that have been created as well as other trends. It's fun to check it out every day to see what's new, and what's hot.

Be sure to check these out:

Most active twines: http://www.twine.com/explore-top-twines

Recently added twines: http://www.twine.com/explore-new-twines

 

How to Add Content to Twine

There are many ways to add content to Twine. The most essential way is using the Twine Bookmarklet. You can get it from the link of that name at the bottom of every Twine page. http://www.twine.com/tools

You may also add content by posting it via email. You can post by email (with attachments) to any twine, to yourself, or to any of your connections.

You can also author content directly in Twine. Within any twine, there is a dropdown menu called "Add Item" near the Summary and Items tabs in the twine. You can use this button to select various types of items to add -- such as bookmarks, notes, etc.

Simply fill out the form to author an item. It's like blogging but there are more types of content.

Soon we will be adding many more types of things you can add and share and eventually we'll even enable you to design your own new types of content as well.

For example, if you want to add a special form for describing something you'll be able to design it, then start using it, and sharing it in Twine. That's coming in a while; we call it "semantic authoring."

Discussions in Twine

One the big activities in Twine is having discussions. Every item that is added is the seed for a potential discussion. At the bottom of the detail page for the item you can add a comment, and see the discussion thread that is forming.

You can view the comments as a thread or chronologically via a little button on at the top of the thread.

You can also start a new discussion by simply creating a note and posting it to any twine or connection you have. As they comment the discussion will form and everyone who can see it will be notified.

The Best Ways to Keep Up With Twine

There are many ways to keep up with Twine.

You can simply visit your Interest Feed using your browser as often as you like.

Twine also sends out a daily Email Digest of recent activity in your twines. You can control what is in that Digest via your Account Settings.

But if you belong to many twines, you may want to start using your Feed Reader to keep up with what's happening. A suggested approach is to subscribe to the RSS-Atom feeds for:

• Each twine you want to track
• Your "Shared with You" tab in your My Items section.
  
• Your Interest Feed.
• Specific searches you want to track
• People you want to follow: Click on their name to view their profile, and then subscribe to the feed from their profile.

If you don't use RSS that's ok, we will be adding more powerful features for filtering what appears in your Interest Feed soon. This will also help to cut down on information overload for heavy users with many interests.

You can configure your Interest feed settings in your account:

http://www.twine.com/user/nova/edit

 

Twine and the Semantic Web / Web 3.0

You may have heard that Twine uses the Semantic Web, or is part of "Web 3.0." But what does this mean, and why should you care?

Web 3.0 is a buzzword that describes the next-evolution of the Web -- what is sometimes thought of as the coming third decade of the Web.

The Semantic Web is a set of new open standards for making next-generation content that will be very important in the Web 3.0 era.

Semantic Web content is different because it contains hidden tags that describe what it means in a machine-understandable format. These semantic tags transform messy Web content into structured data that can be searched and reused in more powerful ways.

Semantic content enables other applications -- such as search engines, advertising systems, personalization tools, and content management tools -- to do a better job of making sense of that content automatically.

Twine is one of the first consumer-facing online services that is almost completely built on top of Semantic Web open standards including RDF and OWL.

But in Twine semantics are a means to an end, not the end in itself. They are not directly visible to users, and they shouldn't be -- most ordinary non-technical users don't care or want that level of technical detail.

The semantics in Twine are however, visible and accessible to developers who know how to view the RDF data of our pages. In the near future, when we release our API's, our RDF and OWL will be even more usable by third-party developers. This will enable a range of third-party apps that work with Twine.

So how does Twine leverage its semantics? We use semantics in many ways:

• Natural language processing to auto-generate semantic tags
• We generate personalized recommendations via analysis of the semantic graph of links between related people, twines, tags and content
• Every piece of content in Twine is a "semantic object" -- it comes from our underlying Twine ontology and has semantic data fields, and it is stored in our semantic platform database. Over time we wil be expanding this, and linking with other ontologies, and even enabling others to create new kinds of semantic objects in Twine.
• Searching in Twine makes use of the semantic structure of our data -- when you search Twine, you are really searching a vast semantic graph of related things. We will be adding a lot to our semantic search in coming releases.
• Also, in the near future, when you can export your Twine data or access it via our API, it will be more easily reusable in other apps and integratable with other semantic datasets outside of Twine.

To learn more and see some visualizations and other examples, see the Tour: http://www.twine.com/tour/semantic

 

Conclusions: What is Twine For?

So what is Twine for? Interest networking.

And what can Twine be used for? Well, many things, actually:

• Keeping up with your interests
• Managing your bookmarks and other Web content
• Sharing / distributing content about interests
• Having discussions about interests
• Meeting people who share your interests
• Growing communal knowledge collections
• Finding your information efficiently in the future
• Discovering new content, people and trends that might interest you

Interest Networking is the next step for social media -- it's the super-unification of blogging, social networking, aggregation, search and discovery. This is what Twine is for.

How To Get Started in Twine

When you first join Twine, we suggest that you begin by following these steps:

1. First fill out your profile. Add a photo, a bio, your links, other profiles, and interests.
2. Then get the Twine Bookmarklet (link at bottom of any page) -- it's essential to have this!
3. Start a public twine for yourself -- for examples, "Sue Smith's Public Twine" -- this is a place where you can post stuff to the public. Think of it like your blog in Twine.
4. Visit the Explore page and join some of the Top 100 Twines to get a feel for what popular twines are like.
5. Now look at your Interest Feed to see what's coming from them.
6. Post some things you like to your public twine. For example, add some posts from your blog, or add some sites, articles, books or videos you like.
7. Start some more twines -- perhaps you have specific hobbies, skills, products and services, or expertise.
   
   • Make public twines about these and invite your friends and colleagues.
     
   • You can also start private times for groups or teams you want to share stuff with -- for example teams in your company or organization.
     
   • Make sure that when you start new twines you always add a photo and a description, and put at least 5 - 10 items in them so that people can see what they are about.
     
   • Then invite some people to them to get them going.
     
   • The more active your twines are, the more likely they will make it into the Top 100 Twines.
8. Promote your twines in the Announce Your Twine Here twine, and then bookmark your twines into it to notify others about them -- please only post a few twines a day to this twine to avoid spamming people (and only content appropriate for all audiences please).
9. Now start inviting your friends to connect with you on Twine. You are well on your way to becoming an expert Twinerian.

 

More Advice

The FAQ twine is a good twine to browse for answers to many questions.

http://www.twine.com/twine/1g75pg1b-2b9/twine-help-and-faqs

 

To learn more about how to get started and get the most out of Twine, see this article:

http://www.twine.com/item/116820659-wv/getting-started-with-twine-steps-every-new-twinerian-should-follow

Question: What is Twine for? How Should I Use It?

First of all, the purpose of Twine is not to help you search. Rather it is to gather content and keep up with what's new around your interests.

 

Interest Networking

Twine is for "interest networking" rather than "social networking." In social networks you keep up with your friends, but in Twine you keep up with your interests.

Your interests may include your friends, but they also include much more -- hobbies, products, companies, places and travel, your profession or industry, health issues, family, projects, entertainment, events, and many other topics. Keeping up with, and sharing, content around interests is what Twine is all about.

To learn more about Interest Networking, join the Interest Networks twine. http://www.twine.com/twine/11v7px1nw-qh/interest-networking.

For general discussion about the concept of "the wisdom of crowds" see: http://www.twine.com/twine/11vsjx3d1-tz/the-wisdom-of-crowds

 

What is a "twine" and What are twines for?

In Twine, you join public or private groups called "twines" that are focused on specific interests. Twines are places for sharing and discussing content and knowledge around an interest, with groups of other like-minded people.

In twines you can leverage the wisdom of crowds to collaboratively collect content, track interests and keep up with what's new. You can also author and add your own original content to twines. Instead of having to do all the work of keeping up with your interests yourself, you can team-up with others who share your passion to scour the Web for the best stuff and grow shared knowledge together.

Your Interest Feed is the Center of Your Life on Twine

Your Interest Feed is the center of your life on Twine -- it is where everything comes together in one place and where you can see what's new with all your interests.

Your Interest Feed appears on your home page in Twine.

Whenever someone adds something new or comments in a twine you belong to you will get notified on your home page Interest Feed. So go ahead and join a bunch of twines about your interests, and then use your Interest Feed to keep up what's new in one place.

You can control which of your twines appear in your Interest Feed using the Account: Twine Settings tab.

http://www.twine.com/account/subscriptions

Managing Your Stuff

You can also manage your own private stuff in Twine -- everything you have added, shared, received from others is aggregated in the My Items section: http://www.twine.com/my-items-all

Soon you will also be able to import bookmarks and other content into Twine so you can keep everything in one place, find it easily, and share things selectively with ohters.

Social Networking in Twine

Twine has simple social networking features built-in. You can see your social network in Twine in your My Connections area.

You can invite your friends to Twine by email, and you can connect to existing members in Twine. You can share with anyone you are connected to -- but you cannot share with people you are not connected to.

You can exchange private messages with your Connections in Twine. Twine will send emails between you and them on your behalf.

Searching

You can search Twine using the search bar. This enables you to find content around specific interests in any twines you belong to, or that are public.

Twine's search features enable simple semantic search -- you can drill down semantically using the Filter bar on the left margin to find semantically related content.

Twine search only searches the content that is inside of Twine -- content contributed by users or mined by Twine around that content. This is higher "signal-to-noise" content than what is found on the open Web -- it's just the best stuff, the stuff that users with strong interests felt was important to read.

The purpose of Twine is really less about search and more about "discovery" -- finding new interesting things that match your interests -- than search. For general search, we recommend Google!

Twine Automatically Adds Semantic Tags

One of the ways Twine adds value to your content is by auto-tagging it. Any content you add to Twine is analyzed using natural language understanding to generate tags for you automatically. The tags appear on the right of the item detail page.

There are different tag panes for place tags, people tags, organization tags, and other tags. You can enter tags into these panes on any item that you have write-permission on.

Tags appear in 2 colors -- blue or orange. The blue tags are from the original content's tags or were tags entered by Twine users. Orange colored tags were detected by Twine's natural language analysis.

Auto-tagging saves you time and generates better, richer tags. But it's still a work in progress. The value of auto-tags can be seen when searching. You can filter your searches to find results with semantic tags for related places, people, organizations or other topics.

Twine Automatically Crawls for Related Content

Many Twine users don't know this, but in fact, Twine does research around your interests automatically to help you gather related content.

For example, if you add content to Twine that contains URLs, Twine will attempt to crawl and pull in the content of those URLs and link them to your content automatically.

To test this, copy and paste the content of a Wikipedia page into a new Note and then save it. Notice at the bottom of the resulting item that there are a whole bunch of links to related pages -- these pages were crawled and automatically generated for you by Twine.

Recommendations and Discovery

One of the main goals of Twine is to help users with content discovery. Twine helps you discover new content that relates to your interests.

As you use Twine, adding content, joining twines, connecting with people, sharing, etc., the system begins to learn about your interests using artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web.

Based on this learning, Twine starts to make personalized recommendations for you about other people, twines and content items you may want to check out.

Using the Explore Page to Find New Twines to Join

The Explore page is where you can see the big picture in Twine. It's important to try it out. http://www.twine.com/explore

The Explore page lets you see the Top 100 most active twines, and also the new twines that have been created as well as other trends. It's fun to check it out every day to see what's new, and what's hot.

Be sure to check these out:

Most active twines: http://www.twine.com/explore-top-twines

Recently added twines: http://www.twine.com/explore-new-twines

 

How to Add Content to Twine

There are many ways to add content to Twine. The most essential way is using the Twine Bookmarklet. You can get it from the link of that name at the bottom of every Twine page. http://www.twine.com/tools

You may also add content by posting it via email. You can post by email (with attachments) to any twine, to yourself, or to any of your connections.

You can also author content directly in Twine. Within any twine, there is a dropdown menu called "Add Item" near the Summary and Items tabs in the twine. You can use this button to select various types of items to add -- such as bookmarks, notes, etc.

Simply fill out the form to author an item. It's like blogging but there are more types of content.

Soon we will be adding many more types of things you can add and share and eventually we'll even enable you to design your own new types of content as well.

For example, if you want to add a special form for describing something you'll be able to design it, then start using it, and sharing it in Twine. That's coming in a while; we call it "semantic authoring."

Discussions in Twine

One the big activities in Twine is having discussions. Every item that is added is the seed for a potential discussion. At the bottom of the detail page for the item you can add a comment, and see the discussion thread that is forming.

You can view the comments as a thread or chronologically via a little button on at the top of the thread.

You can also start a new discussion by simply creating a note and posting it to any twine or connection you have. As they comment the discussion will form and everyone who can see it will be notified.

The Best Ways to Keep Up With Twine

There are many ways to keep up with Twine.

You can simply visit your Interest Feed using your browser as often as you like.

Twine also sends out a daily Email Digest of recent activity in your twines. You can control what is in that Digest via your Account Settings.

But if you belong to many twines, you may want to start using your Feed Reader to keep up with what's happening. A suggested approach is to subscribe to the RSS-Atom feeds for:

• Each twine you want to track
• Your "Shared with You" tab in your My Items section.
  
• Your Interest Feed.
• Specific searches you want to track
• People you want to follow: Click on their name to view their profile, and then subscribe to the feed from their profile.

If you don't use RSS that's ok, we will be adding more powerful features for filtering what appears in your Interest Feed soon. This will also help to cut down on information overload for heavy users with many interests.

You can configure your Interest feed settings in your account:

http://www.twine.com/user/nova/edit

 

Twine and the Semantic Web / Web 3.0

You may have heard that Twine uses the Semantic Web, or is part of "Web 3.0." But what does this mean, and why should you care?

Web 3.0 is a buzzword that describes the next-evolution of the Web -- what is sometimes thought of as the coming third decade of the Web.

The Semantic Web is a set of new open standards for making next-generation content that will be very important in the Web 3.0 era.

Semantic Web content is different because it contains hidden tags that describe what it means in a machine-understandable format. These semantic tags transform messy Web content into structured data that can be searched and reused in more powerful ways.

Semantic content enables other applications -- such as search engines, advertising systems, personalization tools, and content management tools -- to do a better job of making sense of that content automatically.

Twine is one of the first consumer-facing online services that is almost completely built on top of Semantic Web open standards including RDF and OWL.

But in Twine semantics are a means to an end, not the end in itself. They are not directly visible to users, and they shouldn't be -- most ordinary non-technical users don't care or want that level of technical detail.

The semantics in Twine are however, visible and accessible to developers who know how to view the RDF data of our pages. In the near future, when we release our API's, our RDF and OWL will be even more usable by third-party developers. This will enable a range of third-party apps that work with Twine.

So how does Twine leverage its semantics? We use semantics in many ways:

• Natural language processing to auto-generate semantic tags
• We generate personalized recommendations via analysis of the semantic graph of links between related people, twines, tags and content
• Every piece of content in Twine is a "semantic object" -- it comes from our underlying Twine ontology and has semantic data fields, and it is stored in our semantic platform database. Over time we wil be expanding this, and linking with other ontologies, and even enabling others to create new kinds of semantic objects in Twine.
• Searching in Twine makes use of the semantic structure of our data -- when you search Twine, you are really searching a vast semantic graph of related things. We will be adding a lot to our semantic search in coming releases.
• Also, in the near future, when you can export your Twine data or access it via our API, it will be more easily reusable in other apps and integratable with other semantic datasets outside of Twine.

To learn more and see some visualizations and other examples, see the Tour: http://www.twine.com/tour/semantic

 

Conclusions: What is Twine For?

So what is Twine for? Interest networking.

And what can Twine be used for? Well, many things, actually:

• Keeping up with your interests
• Managing your bookmarks and other Web content
• Sharing / distributing content about interests
• Having discussions about interests
• Meeting people who share your interests
• Growing communal knowledge collections
• Finding your information efficiently in the future
• Discovering new content, people and trends that might interest you

Interest Networking is the next step for social media -- it's the super-unification of blogging, social networking, aggregation, search and discovery. This is what Twine is for.

How To Get Started in Twine

When you first join Twine, we suggest that you begin by following these steps:

1. First fill out your profile. Add a photo, a bio, your links, other profiles, and interests.
2. Then get the Twine Bookmarklet (link at bottom of any page) -- it's essential to have this!
3. Start a public twine for yourself -- for examples, "Sue Smith's Public Twine" -- this is a place where you can post stuff to the public. Think of it like your blog in Twine.
4. Visit the Explore page and join some of the Top 100 Twines to get a feel for what popular twines are like.
5. Now look at your Interest Feed to see what's coming from them.
6. Post some things you like to your public twine. For example, add some posts from your blog, or add some sites, articles, books or videos you like.
7. Start some more twines -- perhaps you have specific hobbies, skills, products and services, or expertise.
   
   • Make public twines about these and invite your friends and colleagues.
     
   • You can also start private times for groups or teams you want to share stuff with -- for example teams in your company or organization.
     
   • Make sure that when you start new twines you always add a photo and a description, and put at least 5 - 10 items in them so that people can see what they are about.
     
   • Then invite some people to them to get them going.
     
   • The more active your twines are, the more likely they will make it into the Top 100 Twines.
8. Promote your twines in the Announce Your Twine Here twine, and then bookmark your twines into it to notify others about them -- please only post a few twines a day to this twine to avoid spamming people (and only content appropriate for all audiences please).
9. Now start inviting your friends to connect with you on Twine. You are well on your way to becoming an expert Twinerian.

 

More Advice

The FAQ twine is a good twine to browse for answers to many questions.

http://www.twine.com/twine/1g75pg1b-2b9/twine-help-and-faqs

 

To learn more about how to get started and get the most out of Twine, see this article:

http://www.twine.com/item/116820659-wv/getting-started-with-twine-steps-every-new-twinerian-should-follow

Websites

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/item/116820659-wv/getting-started-with-twine-steps-every-new-twinerian-should-follow

• 

  www.twine.com

  http://www.twine.com/twine/11v7px1nw-qh/interest-networking.

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/user/nova/edit

• 

  www.twine.com

  http://www.twine.com/tools

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/explore-new-twines

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/explore

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/my-items-all

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/twine/11vsjx3d1-tz/the-wisdom-of-crowds

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/explore-top-twines

• 

  The Semantic Web | Twine

  http://www.twine.com/tour/semantic

• 

  Twine - Organize, Share, Discover Information Around Your Interests

  http://www.twine.com/twine/1g75pg1b-2b9/twine-help-and-faqs