Twine and the semantic graph

Roughly a month back, Nova Spivack from Radar Networks was in our in New York office giving us a demo of Twine. This was before their official launch at the Web 2.0 conference which is why I couldn't blog about it earlier. Until I saw Twine, I had wondered what the next competitor to MySpace and Facebook could look like. The answer I discovered is  really something more Twine like. OpenSocial doesn't quite cut it, at least not yet.


So what is Twine? Twine helps you organize, share and find information. It is the semantic web for the user side. It is about information networks and building a semantic graph versus just a social one. The emphasis is not your people relationships alone but on managing your information and the information that you need to have access to. Twine learns about you the more you use it and pushes different content based on that. It creates a semantic profile of you, your friends and colleagues and pushes the right content to you as a result.

Think of it as a place, or a personal assistant or even a portal that learns more about you as you interact with it more. All your information can be housed in Twine. Each time you add a piece of information to Twine, it automatically indexes it, creates a data record and semantically connects that information with other objects both within and outside Twine. It looks for the other people, places, networks and organizations being talked about that relate to what you have added. It is certainly a new way to share and contribute knowledge because it automatically creates semantic relationships between the information objects that you have added. And yes, it redefines customization and personalization too. For more on Twine, check out these blog posts -

EarlyStageVC: Initial Experiences with Twine
Radar Network's Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload
Minding the Planet: Quicktime Video Preview of Twine
Twine for Personal Knowledge Management, But Not Yet