The Mysteries of Twine

One of the primary causes of confusion is probably the word twine.

There is Twine (capitalized), which is the product made by Radar Networks, which you are currently using, and

Then there is a twine which is a group of items.

Twine is called Twine because it is made up of groups of items called twines. So if you wish, you can simply think of twines as groups.

As a Twine user, you can refer to yourself as a Twiner or as a Twinerian. Radar Networks staff are called Radarians.

Now let's dive a little bit deeper and systematically define Twine

twine; a group of items.

item; an object (of some type) and with some properties.

item type; a class of items that share the same (potential) properties - examples of item types include books, pictures, persons, events, etc.

item property; a book item type has some properties that all book items may have defined for them (but which may not all be defined for all books - it depends on what information is available and what the user chooses to input); some book properties are listed below

• Release Date
  
• Attachment
  
• Author
  
• Brand
  
• Description
  
• Detail Page
  
• Document Type
  
• Excerpt
  
• Fiction
  
• Full Content
  
• Genre
  
• Genre
  
• ISBN
  
• ISSN
  
• Image
  
• Industry
  
• Label
  
• Language
  
• Manufacturer
  
• Number Of Pages
  
• Picture
  
• Prequel
  
• Price
  
• Product Type
  
• Sequel
  
• Site
  
• Sku
  
• Table Of Contents
  
• Tag
  
• Url
  
• Product Offering Of
  
• Related Item
  
• Topic Of

The sepcial aspect of Twine is that it has a so called bookmarklet. That is a bookmark which is actually a small script. This bookmarklet you can add to your browser toolbar and when you click it, it will look at the page you're on and see if it can recognize what kind of page you're on.

Say you're on Amazon.com looking at a book. If you press the Twine bookmarklet on that page, it will "pop up" (on the same page) a small panel where you can choose which twine to add the page to.

This is in effect an intelligent bookmark. It means Twine doesn't just see a page with tags and a link, it also sees that this is a book with certain properties and tries to collect them from Amazon.

So Twine has domain-specific knowledge and site-specific knowledge which allows it to extract knowledge about items from pages you visit. It only has a restricted set of item types and websites it recognizes so far - meaning it will index/bookmark anything, but it wohn't have deep insight into everything.

In effect Twine knows the template for some pages such as Amazon books and it can then extract the information from these pages and put it into its own items.

Another aspect of twine is that it tries to understand your interests and will then suggest new twines you might be interested in.

So Twine is in fact a bookmarking system, but on the semantic level, meaning it is actually a knowledge system. It manages the knowledge you insert into it and allows you to share it with others.

In particular you can make twines private or public and decide what other users can do with your twines - for example make it possible to post comments and add new items - or not.

All items have a comment thread associated with them by default. This means that you can comment on all items so you don't have to create an note to comment on another item.

That's some of the features of Twine. Hope you groked it.