What is Twine? What are the Benefits? Why is Twine Unique?

(Note -- If you are reading this because of the "DM" invitation issue on Twitter -- that is a buggy new feature and will be fixed tomorrow! Very sorry about the inconvenience.)

 

What is Twine?

Twine is a new kind of social network for gathering and keeping up with knowledge around interests, on your own and with other people who share your interests. We call it an "interest network" rather than just a social network, because it is all about your interests.

Twine can be used on your own, or with public or private groups and communities.

• It helps you collect and manage your knowledge on the Web.
• It helps you pool and share knowledge with others.
  
• It helps you keep track of what's new around your interests.

What Makes Twine Different?

What makes Twine different from other tools is that it is powered by semantic understanding. Simply put, Twine is smart and learns as you use it.

Twine is smarter than other bookmarking and interest tracking tools that have come before because it combines collective intelligence of humans with machine intelligence -- machine learning, language understanding and the Semantic Web. Twine automatically turns your data into knowledge.

One way you can use Twine is like you might use Delicious or other social bookmarking tools -- you can simply collect bookmarks and other types of content for your own private reuse.

But where Twine gets most powerful is when you team up with others to grow communal collections around interests -- we call these "twines" and they can be private or public.

Secret Sauce: Collective Intelligence + Machine Intelligence

The content in Twine is found by people -- in some cases thousands of people who share a common interest all helping to find the best links and add them to a particular twine about that interest.

Each twine acts as a repository, a knowledge base, and a search engine, but also as a place to discuss and track the content that is being added by others.

Automatically Organizing Your Content

Twine auto-tags your content with semantic tags. That in itself is useful because your content becomes self-organizing. It becomes easier to see what you have (by looking at the Semantic tag maps Twine generates), and you can quickly search and browse to exactly what you want.

The key to this is that Twine does some additional heavy-lifting on each piece of content you add to it.

Using natural language technology, Twine actually reads the content of every item you add to it to figure out what it is about. Twine only sees what you explicitly add to it however.

Take a look at some of the Top 100 Most Active Twines in the Last 7 Days, for example. The front page of each of these twines has a special semantic tag pane on the bottom right which organizes the content automatically, based on what members have added.

Smarter Recommendations

Twine also helps you discover new people and content that match your interests, by giving you personalize recommendations based on what you add and who you connect to.

Recommendations appear at several levels in Twine and are specifically for you, based on what Twine thinks you might like. You will notice them in your Interest Feed, as well as on twine home pages, and on individual pieces of content.

Keeping Up With Your Interests

Twine helps you keep up with your interests by notifying you whenever new things are added to the twines you follow. To get the full benefit of these features you have to be a registered user with a personal account in Twine.

• You can get notified in your Interest Feed on Twine
  
• You can keep up via our daily email digests
• You can also use our RSS feeds

How to Make Use of Twine Effectively

There are several ways to use Twine.

• Watch. You can simply lurk or subscribe to some of the RSS feeds from public twines or queries that interest you.
• Join. Or you can join and use it to collect and manage your own knowledge.
• Contribute. You may also choose to participate in twines so you can gather knowledge with others and make your own contributions.

How To Add Stuff To Twine

There are many ways to add things to Twine, if you are a registered member. Only members can contribute, but anyone can read public content.

• Bookmarklet. You can bookmark things using a simple bookmarklet that you can add to your browser, with no download required. Twine crawls each page you add and makes a semantic bookmark for you automatically. Try some Wikipedia pages, for example!
  
• Post by Email. You can email things in directly to yourself and or to various twines you belong to. You can send notes, URLs, or even Office documents and PDFs.
  
• Import. You can import things (like your bookmarks and contacts). You can import your Delicious bookmarks and other formats. More coming in the future.
  
• Author. You can also author original content right in Twine. You have to be logged in. Just go to your My Items area, or any twine you belong to and click, "Add Item."
  

More ways to add things are coming soon.

Where Twine is Headed Next

Twine is new and it's still a work in progress but has been growing quickly.

We are focused on improving the user-interface and user-experience, the wording of our messaging, and integrating with other social networks in the near-term.

We also have ambitions to make Twine a lot smarter over time, and to open it up as a platform eventually.

Ultimately we believe the engine beneath Twine has a lot of promise to make the Web smarter in many ways. But it's very early in the roll-out and a lot more work is needed. We invite you to come along with us for the adventure!

Contact Us

We love hearing from you and are open to suggestions. We are on Twitter as @twine_official  -- that's a good place to keep up with the project. You can also follow me at @novaspivack