I just ran across an interesting article on the New York Times that described a nifty new software/service called Twine from a San Francisco-based company called Radar Networks that is being beta tested. The article began with asking how often the reader may have spend a great deal of time sifting through documents, online content or other sources of information to find one important nugget and I for one can say all too often.
Between PDFs, internally generated documents, online content I've tagged and external documents I've received from customers, partners, peers and vendors; it can be a daunting task, but it sounds like Twine might provide some relief. According to the article:
"Twine (twine.com) can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize.
Then it does something unusual: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.
Customers have individual accounts on Twine’s Web site, where they save URLs or other information. They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or fashion, or even make the twines public."
The article also introduced a new term for me; "Semantic Web", that is expected to be spurred from this type of application. A good definition for this term was given by Tim Berners-Lee back in 2001 from a presentation developed by Tom Gruber (founder of RealTravel):
"The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."
This term sounds even more applicable now that Web 2.0 is here and social networking has become commonplace. Allowing people to navigate the flood of information and find meaning for themselves and others sounds like a great opportunity for Twine and Radar Networks. Maybe Twine will bring us further down the road to harnessing Web 2.0's "Collective Intelligence". Can anyone out there comment if they are part of the Invite Beta? Would you pay to use Twine?
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