Twine Gets Google Reader Inspired Makeover

Description

Twine Gets Google Reader Inspired Makeover

Twine is the site where social bookmarking meets social networking, and it’s recently been hot on the heels of Delicious in terms of traffic.

Moving full steam ahead, the site has just launched a redesign to their home page, Google Reader

-like functionality for processing items in Twines (groups of feeds for example), and a number of new features to make the experience more intuitive to new users. Twine is also ready to start cashing in on user behavior, adding social product ads that will evolve to become semantic in nature.

Until today, Twine’s been challenged by their not-so-obvious interface that doesn’t quite convey the value of being able to add and track feeds in topic-based groups, or twines, with social functionality. The redesign attempts to solve that problem, highlighting what they offer that’s better than competitors: tools and tracking options to make the search, discovery, and storing of information and topics painless.

The biggest improvement is the news reader view, mirroring the style and functionality of Google Reader, for keeping up with activity in Twines. Plus, the new welcome tab better illustrates product features, shows how users can leverage the reader to drag and drop Twines and gloss over or dive into new items. The filter box also gives users the option to quickly sort twine items by various content types.

Twine’s also added in-line commenting, consolidated conversations, and ads as product blurbs to their item detail pages. Eventually they’re going to build out the advertising piece of Twine detail pages to function as pictured in the image above. So ads will be contextually associated to Twine content, integrated within the page, and include options for sharing, commenting, and purchasing ...

Original URL

http://mashable.com/2009/04/23/twine-reader/

http://mashable.com/2009/04/23/twine-reader/