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The Next Evolution of the Bookmark -- Beyond Del.icio.us?

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There's an interesting discussion in the blogosphere around the new release of del.icio.us (er... I guess it is now called "delicious") today, which I found on Techmeme. The question is: "Who Bookmarks Anymore?"

It's a good question, and I've got a new answer -- based on my experience working on Twine (http://www.twine.com).

Bookmarking is not what it used to be.

People used to bookmark things simply to find them again. But with Google, I'm not sure that's really necessary. It's about as easy to just search for something again as to bookmark it, so why bother bookmarking anymore? In fact I almost never do that anymore.

But I am collecting a VAST amount of bookmarks in Twine -- for a very different reason. And I'm not alone. Thousands of others are adding bookmarks to Twine every day. Why?

Why People Add Bookmarks to Twine

In Twine the act of bookmarking has two very different benefits:

(1) Informing Others. We add bookmarks to Twine to inform others about things they are interested in.

  • Twine is for helping each other keep up with mutual interests. I am a member of hundreds of twines that focus on specific interests of mine. In these twines, I am joining forces with hundreds or thousands of other people who share those particular interests, to collectively scour the Web, find the good stuff, collect it, share it and discuss it.

(2) Discovering Things We are Interested In. We also add bookmarks to Twine to teach Twine about our interests. By doing that Twine helps us discover more things we might like.

  • Twine is creating a rich semantic graph behind the scenes. This graph links people and groups in Twine to related bookmarks, notes, videos, pictures, documents, emails, people, groups, organizations, places, and tags around my interests. Twine applies machine learning to this graph to learn about the interests of individuals and groups and then makes recommendations in context to other things they might find interesting. Adding content to Twine ultimately helps to improve the content Twine suggests to you.

Sharing Feels Good

As a Twine user, I add bookmarks not just for my own benefit -- but for the benefit of OTHERS. I bookmark in order to inform and help others. And they bookmark in order to help me, and others who share their interests.

By adding bookmarks to Twine, we connect with others around topics that we really care about. It's cooperative, collaborative, and collective. And it's a new way to connect with other people who share our interests.

By adding bookmarks to Twine I and others are also sharing our identities, perspectives, and expertise -- so it's a way to express ourselves and help others at the same time.

It just feels good when you find something that other people think is cool or useful, and you connect with them around it. It feels great when others comment on something you found and a real discussion evolves, leading to new friendships and new discoveries. And it's great when others help you find things that really match your interests that you never would have found on your own. That's the power of collective intelligence at work.

The Evolution of Bookmarking

I think bookmarking is evolving:

Stage 1: Solitary Bookmarking. In the beginning, before social bookmarking -- bookmarking was basically a selfish, solitary activity.

Stage 2: Voyeuristic Bookmarking. With the advent of del.icio.us bookmarking became not only a personal activity, but also a voyeuristic activity. One of the many interesting things about del.icio.us was the abiliity to follow what other people you were interested in were bookmarking. Later, del.ico.us added a way to share bookmarks with others -- but that has really never been the main point of del.icio.us.

Stage 3: Altruistic Bookmarking. With Twine, we're taking it further. Not only do we support the personal bookmarking and voyeuristic bookmarking use-cases, but we also support additional  use-cases: bookmarking as an altruistic activity and bookmarking for discovery. In Twine we bookmark to help and inform others. By teaming up with other people around shared interests we all benefit. And we also bookmark to teach Twine to help us find more things we like.

Semantic Bookmarking

Twine is not the only company providing Stage 3 bookmarking capabilities. Others such as StumbleUpon helped to pioneer this idea, and they deserve some credit here. Another company that has made very important contributions is Digg. I think Digg's primary contribution has been around the collaborative filtering aspects of social bookmarking.

But while Twine is not the first company to do cool things with bookmarks, Twine is the only company I know of that is applying an arsenal of technologies including the Semantic Web, natural language processing, machine learning, and collective intelligence to bookmarking.

Semantic bookmarking has a lot more potential than old-fashioned bookmarking. And we think that this combination of technologies -- which includes semantics and more -- will enable us to take bookmarking further than anyone has before.

Bookmarking and Search

Bookmarks are metadata -- they describe resources on the Web. You can learn a lot about things on the Web by who bookmarks them, how they tag them, who they share them with, what comments are added etc. It's an incredibly rich dataset for learning about the Web.

Think about that for a moment. The things that people bother to collect, share and comment on are the things that really matter. It's the signal, not the noise.

The things that lots of people with particular common interests bother to bookmark, share and discuss are often the best, or at least most interesting, things about various topics. Here at Twine, we think that's a pretty fascinating opportunity.

As the Web becomes increasingly noisy, we need to find new ways to sift through the data to find the interesting, useful nuggets. Bookmarking definitely can help do that. Many future search engines will take this into account. In fact, Google is already starting to explore that. I'm sure others will too. I hope Twine can help with that.

Beyond Bookmarks

Bookmarking is not enough anymore. People need a way to collect and share ANY kind of information: documents, notes, emails, products, videos, photos, contacts, tags, collections of things, etc.

Beyond just managing and sharing their bookmarks, people need a way to manage and share anything -- it doesn't matter what kind of content it is, what matters is that it relates to their interests. Interests are more important, and there are many different ways to indicate an interest, and share content around it.

The notion of a service that is just for bookmarks, and not for any other kind of information, is old-fashioned. Bookmarks are just one of many kinds of things we need to keep track of and share on the Web. In fact, the real value comes from being able to form, share, and learn from collections that include many different types of information.

I think the era of thinking about bookmarking in isolation is over. While Twine starts with bookmarks, it includes much more than that: photos, videos, notes, emails, documents, and other kinds of data records. Ultimately, Twine is designed to be able to include an open-ended range of types of information in the future. The underlying semantic engine behind Twine makes this possible -- and while we have only exposed a tiny bit of that in the product so far, more is coming.

Imagine being able to do what people have been doing with social bookmarking, with anything -- even custom forms and data record types that you invent?

Interest Networks

The real goal of Twine is to be the best place for connecting around interests on the Web. We call this "interest networking" and I think it is the next step after social bookmarking, blogging and social networking -- really it's the next step for social media in general.

In social bookmarking tools, people focus on keeping up with bookmarks. In blogging tools they focus on authoring and keeping up with blog posts. In social networks they focus on keeping up with friends.

But what do all of these activities have in common? Answer: They are all about interests in the end. They are all special cases of keeping up with interests, sharing interests, and connecting around interests. That's why I think interest networking is the next evolution of social media. Simply put, it's the logical convergence of these different activities.

Twine and Delicious

Very soon we will be releasing the abilility to import del.icio.us bookmarks, as well as bookmarks from other places into our growing semantic graph.

By bringing your bookmarks into Twine, you can start to get more long-term value out of them. Not only does Twine give you more ways to manage them, but it also helps you share them in more ways, and it learns from them to help you discover new things.

We're not suggesting that people should stop using del.icio.us. That's not necessary. We view del.icio.us as a silo that we can integrate with and add value to, and learn from. If you use del.icio.us, Twine could provide some great added value in the future, even if you continue to use del.icio.us and many other tools as well.

Twine is still in beta and not everything is done yet -- so it's still a bit early in the process. Some of the cooler features we are working on are not yet ready to release.

But I invite you to come in and start playing with it now. And very soon you will be able to start importing bookmarks and other kinds of data, and playing with that as well.

Then, later in the year, we'll help you do even smarter things with your bookmarks, and really, with your interests... stay tuned!

 

Comments

  • Public Comments

    • Aldo Bucchi Aldo Bucchi
      16 months ago


      So we agree... it is all about the interests. That's what gets me out of bed in the first place.
      So Twine will become my "surfing" assistant and, over time, become more involved in helping me get more out of my time. Eventually it will end up cutting the cost and generating a highly relevant interest feed, etc. Sounds *really* interesting Nova.

      When reading this I remembered a question I have been wanting to make...
      I currently have an in-house system that provides skill management and integrates social bookmarking with my knowledge bases ( semwikis ). I built this for an internal commercial need... and I guess I could eventually replace it with Twine.

      Obvious question coming: Will there be a commercial / enterprise service?

      Just thinking out loud:
      1. create a team account ( for my company )
      2. point Twine to a SPARQL endpoint and have this data flow into the site ( and into the gazetteer behind the curtains )
      3. map my private ontologies to Twine's ( persons, events, locations, etc )
      4. use Twine as the brains, blogs, bookmarks and UI ( groupware in office terms )
      5. feed other applications through Twines endpoints, with data that is now "socially" enriched


        Best,
        A
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      1. blang blang
        16 months ago


        I completely agree with you. I think that social bookmarking never really understood the term "social". Websites like digg and reddit claim that their bookmarking is within a social habitat. However, their social networks are extremely oversaturated (with spam and crap) and were really never that strong to begin with.
        I think this is why StumbleUpon will survive and is why I believe (one of the reasons) Twine will prosper - simply because the social networking aspect is very strong.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      2. Yihong Ding Yihong Ding
        16 months ago


        Nova,

        I just posted a response to your article. The link inside Twine is here, and the original link is here.

        thanks for the post and you always bring more thinking for your readers.

        Yihong
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      3. Adam Lindemann Adam Lindemann
        16 months ago


        Nova, actually I would say that the reason that we book mark has absolutely nothing to do with altruism and everything to do with its opposite - a desire to build and express self. If you look at the development of a child you will see a natural desire by the child to lay claim to objects that they can describe as "mine." I think that the book marking of knowledge and informational resources is a similar desire by the individual to define their self, not in the physical realm but in the intellectual one by furnishing their intellectual home with thoughts and knowledge that they are happy to associate their individual identity with. Now, does the individual self, then want to co-operate and connect with other individuals who share a similar interest - sure, but this is not altruism is the natural desire of an individual self to connect and co-operate with those who also choose to furnish their intellectual homes in a similar manner.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      4. Bill Anderson Bill Anderson
        16 months ago


        Adam has a very interesting point about what we choose to share and that, sometimes, I'm sharing online because I want to express an identity. But I also collect bookmarks because I'm studying or researching a topic and want to save the references. I did this in graduate school by collecting reprints of papers in a filing cabinet (OK, maybe more than one). I also share specific items on del.icio.us with specific people with whom I've had specific conversations. That, to me, is like a slow conversation on a topic.

        And Nova, I also agree that I share things I think others will enjoy.

        But I don't want to reduce what sharing is about to an identity expressing activity.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      5. Jack Porter Jack Porter
        16 months ago


        I agree with you on the Interest Network, but I think it will be more than just aggregating content, it will aggregate experts. We the popularity of Video Podcasting, I think there will be a lot of Interest Networks that will have "Mavens" that use Video Podcast to tell the interest network what is happening that is important and how to stay in the know.

        I believe these streams will begin with a Maven, then expert opinion, then community recommendations, and finally content. I think the real "intelligent agents" of Web 3.0 are going to be "people" and these experts will begin to get celebrity status, think "Leo Leporte".
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      6. Dolors Reig Dolors Reig
        15 months ago


        Very interesting note/post. I agree with you on almost all (good social bookmarking evolution theory) but i believe in blog´s importance on explainig, extending our interests. ¿What about a Twine new feature that improve blog integration? It could be a sidebar widget showing lastests especifically Twine items.

        I think that integration itself must be a main Twine improving feature. Not only importing delicious bookmarks but also showing any Twine activity on our Friendfeed or similar lifestreaming services widgets.

        I agree with Yihong Ding and could go beyond: Blogs are privileged tools to show our interests enrichned.

        I´ve written something like a translation of some of your points to spanish on my blog: http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/2008/08/04/marcar-o-no-marcar-esa-es-la-cuestion-twine-y-los-blogs/
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine

      7. Oier Marigil Oier Marigil
        15 months ago


        Great post!

        I'm looking forward to see the importing bookmarks feature working.
        Nova Spivack - My Public Twine
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