Twine is Now Integrated with Twitter

Tweet What You Twine

Today Twine launched a landmark set of features that we have been working on for quite a while: We have integrated Twine with Twitter.

For this first phase of integration we have made it possible to "tweet what you twine."

This means that anything you add to Twine (that you make visible to the public) can optionally be sent to your Twitter account as an update with a TinyURL. Your followers can then see this link and click on it to view the item you added in Twine.

• You can configure your Twine + Twitter account settings here: https://www.twine.com/account/network
  
• You may set your preference to automatically tweet everything you twine, or to only tweet when you want to. In the latter case, you can choose whether you want to tweet at the time you add something or share in Twine -- an option to tweet then appears in the Twine bookmarklet and sharing dialogs.

I personally prefer to choose to tweet what I twine on a per bookmark basis rather than all the time -- since I don't always think that everything I twine is Twitter-worthy. So I have opted to NOT automatically tweet everything I twine. I don't want to overload my Twitter stream with bookmarks -- but every so often I do want to send bookmarks to my followres -- and this new feature makes it so much more convenient.

It is so surprising easy (and cool!) to send bookmarks to Twitter from the Twine bookmarklet, and from the "Share" button on items in Twine. Try it!

What We Learned from Twitter

As some of you know, we've had quite a learning experience integrating Twine with Twitter. We initially tested a feature that DM'd your followers and invited them to follow you in Twine. It also had a bug or two when we initially tested it and it took a few days to fix. During that period lots of people got DM'd by their friends on Twine but that proved to be a bit confusing (and annoying) so after getting great feedback we took out that feature promptly.

We may bring the invite-your-Twitter-followers feature back with some improvements in the future, but in a new way -- to prevent it from being annoying. That is still being discussed. We don't have a definitely date for that yet.

But for now the ability to tweet what you twine is much better approach and is more valuable and so we're starting with this as a result of the feedback we have received.

Next Steps for Integrating Twine and Twitter

We are thinking about what to do next as we continue to tightly couple Twine and Twitter.

One great suggestion we have had from many of our users is to enable what you tweet in Twitter to be pulled into Twine too (we call that "twine what you tweet" as opposed to "tweet what you twine"). That's a cool idea and we are considering it for the future.

Another idea we are considering is to enable you to tweet from particular twines to particular Twitter accounts. So for example you might create a Twitter account for a particular twine you run, and then have everything that is added to that twine get tweeted to that Twitter account. This would enable people to follow particular twines right in Twitter.

We don't have a definite timeline for adding these additional Twitter features but we are thinking about them. We think that today's "tweet what you twine" feature is a solid first step. Let's see what happens with it first.  Keep the great suggestions coming!

The Twine Bookmarklet is now the Best Way to Bookmark and Share on the Web

The Twine bookmarklet is in my opinion the most powerful and coolest bookmarklet on the market (make sure you have the recent one that was added earlier this month -- get it again if you are not sure).

You get more for your effort by bookmarking in Twine because Twine crawls the URL, indexes the full-text of every URL you bookmark (so you can search on the full text in the future), and does other cool things like generating semantic tags, making a nice summary, enabling sharing with groups, email addresses and more. Try it out (you have to be registered, logged in user of Twine) here: http://www.twine.com/tools

Now you can also send directly to Twitter from the Twine bookmarklet. If you are doing a lot of sharing of bookmarks into Twitter -- this is something you should try. It is the best way to do it in my opinion and provides more long-term value.

Other Goodies in this Release

Beyond this feature, we have also released several new improvements today, including:

• The ability to see all your recommended twines and members at once (the ability to see all your item recommendations is coming). Try them here:
  http://www.twine.com/recommended-twines
  http://www.twine.com/recommended-members
  
• And various other improvements will be detailed in the Release Notes shortly. You can get them from the Twine News & Announcements Twine, when they are available (soon) here: http://www.twine.com/twine/1kvchdnf-44/twine-news-and-announcements
  

What We're Working On Next

Speedups. We are working on some new architecture improvements that will massively speed up Twine. We hope to launch these this summer. In the meantime we are doing optimizations in every release (every three weeks) to continually improve speed in the interim.

Improved Interest Feed. In the next release (next month) we will be launching a new and improved version of our Interest Feed that is similar, but better than, Google Reader. Stay tuned!

Improved Item Detail page design. We are redesiging item detail pages to make much more sense and to fix several user-experience problems in the current (old) design. This will really make item detail pages more useful and a lot prettier too.

Popularity Rankings for Items. We're working on ways to show you what items are most popular in Twine. We can do this algorithmically rather than requiring you to vote -- but voting/ratings are also being considered for the future, if there is still any need for them after we launch our popularity ranking features.

Search Improvements. We are going to clean up our search results pages -- they need a lot of work. We've been focused on other features for the last few releases. First of all we want to get rid of junk (like twines with no content and other clutter). We also are going to improve relevance of results. And even more powerful search improvements are coming this summer after we migrate to our next-generation architecture. Watch this space for some cool announcements in the future.

User Interface and User Experience Improvements. We are constantly working on our UI and UE based on feedback, testing, and analysis of what our users are using and not using. We are progressively working through every area of Twine and making improvements as we go, every three weeks. This is an area of constant refinement.