[Sigia-l] Social + Semantic = Twine

[Paola Kathuria]

In Oct 2007, I wrote about twine:
> I've signed up for the invite. I suspect I'll end up
> admiring Twine.

I received my invite to the beta of twine.com today and have
just spent a few hours on it.

There seems to be basic UI mistakes and some big tagging issues.

Has anyone else tried it? What do you think?

Twine's automatic tagging system creates orange links in content
you write. These go to permanent URLs for that object.

The automatic tags get populated to a side-bar panel with headings
such as places, people, organisations.

The false-hits seem pretty high. For example, in a note, someone
used the phrase "New Oxford American Dictionary". "New Oxford"
for automatically tagged as a place. Even if "Oxford" had been
tagged as place, it wouldn't have been relevant to the note.
What if Oxford was the name of a person or a band?

You go to the side panel and find the tag in one of the expanding
areas and delete it (after a [confirm delete] pop-up *sigh*) and
then the orange link is also removed from the content.

twine is supposed to be the place you post links, notes, photos,
videos, and other kinds of content around a subject area (twine).
The idea is that it will learn what you are interested and
recommend people or other things to you. It means that, instead
of posting to delicious or Facebook (or wherever), you post to
twine instead.

But the beta doesn't currently let you import pre-existing
collections of links.

It also seems to me that, in the long run, most words will
end up as orange links. If people don't correct the automatically-
tagged terms, they orange links won't go to anywhere meaningful.

Whether twine succeeds or fails, it's a huge challenge for any
new online service to try to lure people from the online places
they're used to.


Paola
--
http://www.paolability.com/