Twine Disappoints After Semantic Web Hype
Twine is the most hyped semantic app of the season and recently opened up for some press previews. General availability of this smart, social bookmarking and research tool may come in a matter of weeks.
If that's the case, it will probably be too soon. Twine has some major shortcomings that I think are going to drastically hinder the service's adoption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those shortcomings come down to usability and performance. Hopefully these problems will be resolved, but it isn't going to be easy.
Richard MacManus said months ago that Twine might be the first mainstream semantic web application to hit the market. Semantic technology seems very likely to be key to the future of the web, but Twine demonstrates just how hard it's going to be for that technology to operate close to the surface of the user interface.
The Basic Idea
Twine looks at content and parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subject tags. Users are then able to navigate between related content, view recommended content and connect with recommended people with related interests.
The semantic analysis is faster and smarter than full text search. Making content online machine readable cuts time and thought out of discovery of related information, letting users focus on higher levels of engagement. It's a great idea and I hope Twine can overcome the issues I'm seeing with it.
Problem: It Doesn't Work Very Well
The biggest problem with Twine right now may be that it doesn't work as well as it should. It doesn't consistently grab summary text or tags for pages you save in Twine, it doesn't recognize article authors as relevant people and it often captures summary information about the domain you're on instead of a particular page's content.
Twine founder Nova Spivack saw that I was saving pages that weren't coming in with summary information and commented on one of my items that the page at issue was irregularly formatted. That's why Twine wasn't able to analyze it, he said. That is a major problem; most of the web is made up of ugly, non-standard pages. Fundamental to the value proposition of a top-down semantic analysis tool should be the ability to discover meaning from unstructured data. Many of the other problems Twine faces will be challenging but do seem solvable. This one could be a deal breaker.
Serious researchers will also be frustrated with the lack of support for authenticated (password protected) pages and the absence of RSS feeds -though feeds may come as soon as the app is public.
Problem: It's Poorly Organized
Twine has bitten off a whole lot to chew on. It's an impressive service for the most part. Unfortunately, full-featured social bookmarking is information-dense enough that adding all the semantic features and recommendations from Twine turns information architecture and User Experience into huge challenges.
Twine's user experience is confusing. It's hard to keep track of all the levels and types of information available, site navigation is dizzying and my use of the service happened in spite of the interface.
There are a lot of little things Twine could do to help, like defaulting the saved item path to the same category I saved the previous item in.
There are a variety of different approaches already explored in the social bookmarking market. Del.icio.us is simple and does what it says it does, nothing more nothing less. Ma.gnolia does a little bit more, looks great and is relatively self-explanatory. Furl.net was probably better technology than either Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia but the user experience makes you want to punch some one and the service has withered accordingly. Twine needs to blow this category out of the water but it doesn't.
I'm sure with some practice I could learn to use Twine more easily, but that's not an ideal first experience. I don't feel compelled to keep trying, other than because of my interest in the semantic technology. There's no visualization, just flat interlinked pages, the only zing to the product today is the recommendation feature.
I would use Twine for recommendation alone, but the value of that feature is minimal until the service finds a large number of users. As it stands, that's not likely to occur. When it comes to collective organization and discovery of content - nothing is as important as network effect.
Twine's in closed beta right now - but it's been in the oven for a long time, has substantial investor backing and is highly anticipated. Despite all that support, it still feels half baked. I hate to say that because everyone says the trouble with the semantic web is that products never come to market - but I don't think Twine is ready. I don't know if it ever will be. Someone else may have to be the first mainstream semantic web app - or maybe no one will be. Semantics may be best suited to the back end. I hope Twine, or someone, can bring something like this to market that I want to use.
You can join the long line of people requesting beta access and make your own decision about Twine probably later this month. For a more positive review, see Rafe Needleman's write up at Webware.
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Sounds like some big hurdles to cross. UI issues are just not a good thing to have with everything to choose from on the web. And I really do hope that someone can work through the issue of aggregating data usefully. It seems that none of the semantic style discovery tools I've had a chance to try out are quite smart enough yet. They either end up with so much of everything that most of it is duplicate spam or they miss a good cross-section of what is happening.
Marshall - I agree completely on many of your specific points but came to a different conclusion about Twine. The product isn't what it eventually will be, precisely why it needs to be in the public's hands at this point. As you know well, the semantic web is still very nascent. But because of, not despite, its singular complexities, early applications need to come out somewhat half-baked. A smarter Web can't be smarter without our input.
Having said that, your point about needing more practice to use Twine is excellent and could be a big stumbling block for it and other apps like it. If users are too frustrated to dig into it, the input needed to smooth out Twine will dry up. I think, though, that when it comes to true market-altering technologies, we need to be willing to wade through some of the rough to find the diamond.
Twine never stood a chance with me.
As soon as the techOsphere lit up with "semantic web app", and "first of it's kind"... i was yawning all the way to the bank... (ok, that didn't make much sense. The point is, I was yawning.)
My close friends and my family can certainly attest to the fact that I was very critical of all the reviews of Twine and I was baffled by the lack of knowledge about what "semantic web" actually means.
It was clear to me that the Twine team hopped on a buzzword and wanted to ride that train to happy town. Marshall is the first journalist/blogger (i've seen) to utter a negative connotation towards this over-hyped service... and for that, you will forever remain a legend to me. :) Regardless of the ease with which your colleagues have been duped by these Twine folks, you see through it.. god bless you.
That's the main utility of these sites - discovery and recommendations, but it is extremely hard to get the UI right when you add all the features.
They also suffer when the crowds swamp them (like digg), or not there yet (new.yc). Del.icio.us recommendations are a joke, they do not even filter duplicate urls in your network feed. StumbleUpon doesn't have a UI - you just land on the target (if you're lucky).
There's another site that has potential to blow this whole category out of the water with fine tuned recommendations, but I promised not to mention it any more :)
have you tried jaanix.com? It works.
Marshall,
I completely agree with this. After Lew Tucker's Twine keynote at ETech08 this past Thursday I got an invite to the beta and I've been playing with it. I've had similar experiences with formatting and usability saving pages - something definitely needs to be done about it. Feeds should also be added. Something that bothered me in particular is that "Twines" become socialized garbage quickly. Right now there are only about 400-500 users who have access to the beta. Given the hype of the technology, it seems logical that when this puppy is opened up to the public it'll go to 100s of thousands quickly. The technology works really well when you can manage a twine's quality and density (i.e. be selective in who you invite to keep the Twine focused) but the second it goes public, people just start including garbage -- like too many cooks in the kitchen, the soup gets spoiled. It'll be interesting to see how people manage and navigate Twine when it goes live.
If you want to see an example of a semantic recommendation service that doesn't work very well, I'm using the Yahoo term extractor in http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/serendipitwitterous to provide related links to twitter feeds...
The geocoder that sniffs your tweets and plots any locations it finds on a map doesnlt work that well in http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/geotwitterous
But from a shakey start, maybe they'll improve? ;-)
Posted by: psychemedia.myopenid.com
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March 11, 2008 2:18 PM
isn't the whole proposition of semantic web based on structure data? i thought that the only way it works is if people use some standard set or sets of elements to describe their data?
so isn't this like saying that an RDBMS is not working well because it can't query non-relational data? or that a train isn't working well because it can't go off it's tracks?
isn't this one of the fundamental constraints of semantic web?
I'm no expert on this, so maybe i'm wrong. If we're saying that we're trying to find meaning in unstructured data, isn't that pretty much what Google is trying to do now?
Marshall, Marshall, Marshall. You're a great writer, generally right on top of things. Matter of fact, of the Web 2.0 A-list bloggers, you've demonstrated the most knowledge of the Semantic Web. You even get -- which few do -- that recommenders are an important part of a comprehensive solution.
This being said, you're way off on Twine. First, you've been on Twine only since March 7th. Second, you have only three connections, Rafe, Nova (their CEO) and yours truly. As a result, you haven't had a chance to explore Twine for social knowledge sharing. Third, you've subscribed to only three Twines. That's it!! You did choose two of the most active Twines, but you didn't explore how Twine can be used beyond geekdom. In contrast to what Gabe has tried to do, Digg, et al, Twine has a lot of value when exploring broader topics. See the China, Public Policy, and Futures Twines as three examples. Honestly, you need to get a lot more engaged before you can really comment. At this point, you've had minimal engagement. And, as you know, I'm the MOST engaged private beta tester, so I believe I'm in a good position to make an objective observation. (Remember, I was a VP-level analyst at META. So I have the street cred for making objective observations on emerging technologies; I'm not just some blogger or the like.)
In fact, here in Qingdao (China) we're starting to use Twine as a combination social network + social bookmarking site + threaded online discussion group + wiki. We have two groups that are slowly getting engaged with Twine. One is a local ecumenical Christian fellowship for expats, the other (which is much more active at this point) is for the de facto Chamber of Commerce for Westerners living in Qingdao. Although we haven't rolled out Twine for the general membership, the "Chamber" Executive Committee has adopted Twine as its key communications and knowledge sharing tool. Matter of fact, the head (yes, THE head) of one of the largest U.S. operations in China is getting addicted to Twine ... as is his wife!! We've even had the 17 year old adopted daughter of one of our local Kiwis start a Twine which already has among the most members. Started four or so days ago, it's already among the top dozen or so Twines. (It's the Connecting People Together Twine.) And I've even created a TUG (Twine Users Group) for Qingdao which I'll officially launch after we've had a chance to roll out Twine to at least a few hundred fellow expats ... and we'll likely follow with a TUG in Shanghai, too.
To be very frank, I was personally concerned about rolling out Twine to media types such as yourself. It's not ready for prime time, but nobody ever said it was. It's in PRIVATE beta. Hand holding helps ... and I've done a lot of hand holding. But I'm also dealing with a crowd that has NO IDEA what social bookmarking is, what a wiki is. Yet, I/we have demonstrated that Twine has a great deal of utility for newbies; it's not just for semweb geeks.
Unfortunately, you entered Twine just when the UI changed. This was bad timing. The new UI should have been rolled out to the existing private beta testers BEFORE (and NOT concurrently) with letting in selected media personalities. I concur that the UI needs some work, as does the daily e-mail Digest. Hey, it's a work in progress.
But, Marshall, the core tech underneath Twine's hood is what really matters, is the power (and competitive advantage) for Twine. The UI can be improved. I've already seen a lot of improvement in the UI; it will get a lot easier to use.
Without being modest, I can tell you that there are two power users of Twine: Myself and Hrafn Thorisson. (If you check the Explore page, you'll see this.) Both of us are extremely active in two private Twines, the Product Community and Evangelism Twines. We also have a lot of direct discourse with Nova -- "direct" as is by private e-mail. I can tell you first hand that Nova and his team (Peter, Scott, Chris, Jim, James) are highly responsive to our suggestions. Don't be too concerned: When someone needs to piss on Twine, we do the pissing. But they clean up the mess, make Twine better. And they respond in fairly short order, too. Hey, not everything can be changed overnight. Changes, however, do happen on a fairly frequent basis, more so than in any other beta I've been part of.
Marshall, don't give up on Twine. Just watch it, pledge to write another review in July and then another in December. You'll become a true believer over time. BTW, feel free to contact me if you want to toss around any ideas, need uber user feedback. My contact info is on my Twine profile page; don't use the e-mail address that I provide for my R/WW comments. Thanks!!
Cheers,
- David Scott Lewis
Oh, when I said "... I'm not just some blogger or the like," what I meant was that I'm not easily swayed by a "gee whiz" factor as are so many others (often bloggers) within the Web 2.0 universe. After all, Twine is about Web 3.x+. ;-)
Gee whiz, I thought Twine looked so cool.
I am still testing it myself, but so far my experience has been good. I'll continue to check it out though, because Marshall raised a lot of great points.
I posted a more extensive reply on my blog, but the bottom line is that Marshall raised a few points that speak to features which are still under development right now. Twine is a work in progress and is still in Beta and there is still work to do. But none of the issues Marshall raises are insurmountable and in fact they are very much on our list.
I'll introduce myself as a Twine Beta tester since October. And one of the most active users now, second to David (hat tip). Introductions aside, this is an excellent article Marshall and many of your arguments I completely agree with. But what desperately needs further emphasis here, and what I feel puts an entirely different perspective on the subject, is that Twine is not presented as a finished product. Not even close. It's a product in the making; seeking active users and their feedback to help make improvements. Like Nova Spivack mentions in his recent article - a public product is months away.
The "beta" tag is (unfortunately) often (mis)used as a pre-apology for potential user discomfort. This is not the case here. Radar Networks has stated that interface and functionality is being actively worked on, and that by "Beta" they mean an incomplete product. I can personally attest to the evolution of Twine over a period of months: change has been constant, user feedback catered to, improvements continual.
If the development team continues at this pace; we will be looking at a very different Twine when it's publically released.
To share my story, and hopefully shed some light on Twine: When I first got access, I had a similar experience to yours. There was no roadmap, no model of use to tell me the efficient way of using Twine. I felt confused for some time, swinging back and forth from Del.icio.us because of this. But gradually, I migrated over. Largely due to being able to view different types of items on the same site, and because I saw the autonomy at work (identifying names, people, places). It's actually remarkably close already to eliminating need to visit video collections in my YouTube account, and photo albums on my Flickr account.
On another note: in my personal opinion there's an overemphasized focus on the user groups. The twines. They are not your powertool — the search is the powertool. Searching for items on Twine.com is independant of specific twines, leaving organization up to you to decide when you need to wade through your data. For example, when you want to find all Stanley Kubrick related items, or a specific one, you can search everything (by everyone, in any twine). Search a single twine, two - three - none. Not to forget that the data type can be specified in the same manner (image, video, article, author, contact, etc.). And I could go on. This is how I use Twine — items are organized by me at the time when I need them and in the order I need them. For all current beta testers and future ones, I guess this is a powertip.
Consolidation of online services is something I welcomed from the start; semantic or not. Spare me the countless visits to several sites. And Twine's methods of search are, in addition to recommendations, already uniquely useful in this regard and I expect continued improvements from all angles.
But then there's the eternal issue with products that have potential to change the way we work. We've been searching for ways to jump-start a semantic web to allow computers to aid us in our information overflow. But when a solution closes in on the horizon we get a Moon Illusion; the ideal concept makes a product seem great. Will Twine deliver? I can't speak for everyone, I personally find it useful and see its potential. But the ultimate product is months away, and hopefully it will make a splash.
Thank you. I'm sure your article will assist shaping the design!
-Hrafn Th.
Hi Marshall - interesting review - although the headings reflected the negatives, I was pleased to see many positives in there which indicate that the issues are worth overcoming. Like David, I think some more testing or exposure to the features on your part (and mine, as I am still a relatively new user to Twine) may be needed. Mention of much functionality such as the choice of twineable item types, item customisation ("add detail") or the "e-mail to a twine" feature (which I believe are extremely useful) were omitted above.
But I also think the review misses out on the community aspects of "twines". I forsee that these twines will act as the "social objects" (see presentation by Jyri) that will draw you back to the service, in a much stronger manner than other social bookmarking sites currently do. Of course, having more public users will help, but from experience I know that it is a good idea to build on a core group of regular users (in Twine's case, mainly techies) before increasing the user base too much.
Oops, broken URL - should link here.
Here's a working example from some other people.
http://www.zemanta.com/demo/
@Mr. Scott Lewis.
The problem with consumers is that they usually build an opinion in much less than 3 days....
Still, good luck on improving Twine, it sounds an interesting product.
I have not got my Twine Beta yet, but I wonder if there is use case confusion? My "inner analyst" cannot resist drawing quadrants. In this case:
On one axis - Impact
On the other axis - Ease of Adoption
If the target market is "everybody" then, as somebody pointed out, you need to get them hooked in 30 seconds ie ease of Adoption. That's the consumer attention span online - even Delicious is too long for real consumer attention, has to be YouTube like.
If you want to get to everybody via geek early adopters (classic chasm strategy) then you have to deal with the fact that they are already using lots of standalone tools and persuading them to switch is hard. The power users who can get real Impact from a tool like this - people who do research for a living - tend to use multiple best of breed tools that they constantly change. Persuading them to convert to one "swiss army knife" would be hard.
Love to try it though, my "inner geek" craves it.
So out of 500 beta users there are 2 willing to come to it's defense... hmmm. Why not open 'er up and let the chips fall where they may and let us decide for ourselves... comments that are longer than the initial blog post don't do it for me... hehehe
Marshall... i still like the blog post! Thank you for it still! Most people talking this service up like its the next big thing since space travel have NEVER USED IT!!!! ... you have, and you have had your say. It doesn't matter who your friends are or what twines you've subscribed to... you have all the information the evangelists have PLUS your own personal experience...
to my Twine friends:
"semeantic web"... I have yet to see a page of markup to support this claim. Furthermore, semantic web is all about portability, communication, and openness.. and Twine is about as elitist and private as i've ever witnessed... stop abusing the term "semantic web" until you are ready to live up to it... publicly.
as for web 3.0 ... web 2.0 is barely off the ground and in it's infancy, do not be so hasty with words like "web 3.0"... especially if you don't have the goods to back it up... (but then again... i guess "Web 2.0" = "invite only beta" , so does "web 3.0" = "super long private beta with very public marketing" ... if so, god help us. I'm inclined to assume this app was given a lot of attention based on it's founding team, which used their pre-existing social capital to build an un-proportional buzz around their new little project... could I be wrong (as i have been so many many times, hehe) ?
I would be less negative if you didn't kick your spin-machines into high gear and try to hype this thing last year, long before any of us "nobody's" had a chance to try it... :(
Matt - ( previous post) - There are a lot of real applications that have real semantic components. They just aren't marketed as such. Take an example of ZoomInfo which started out with a similar mission ( though not in social networking era). They extracted real entities and established relationships between people and organizations. While it's true that semantic applications take longer to mature, it is at the same time very easy to enhance the learning engine with user feedback and behavior. Your every day search engine "google" has semantic aspects that are not marketed that way but cleverly disguised to provide a valuable service. Just search for "restaurants san francisco" and see the related the search options at the bottom of the page.
Marshal: I think it is a bit premature to mention things like "deal breaker" and "no visualization, just flat interlinked pages". First off this is early days, they are not going to publicly launch until a year or so. They have already tackled a lot of thorny, tough problems so spidering content shouldn't be too far off.
No visualization is an area that they are lacking now, but remember all this data is linked data. No other service offers this. Let me repeat that, "No other current social system allows this". This means I can take my data and do whatever I want with it. It will be easy to create mashups and Nova has stated that they will take the best and work it into Twine.
Matt [comment 20]: Huh? Just because Twine is in closed beta does not = elitist. They are *testing* things. I don't believe they are the first in history to have a small initial testing group (I might be wrong).
"semantic web is all about portability, communication, and openness" - huh? Semantic Web is a technology stack that can allow for many things. There is no manifesto that says anyone using semantic tech must be open. It is tech that helps build better web systems -- what the companies want to do with it is up to them.
""semeantic web"... I have yet to see a page of markup to support this claim". Are you a Twine user? If so go to the tutorial on how to get your data as RDF linked data and you can do *whatever you want* with it. Twine has a dual nature, what we humans read and what the machine reads. I can switch between them at any time and can navigate the RDF with any external tools.
It seems you are not yet a Twine user and that you feel like a "nobody" because of that... That is no reason to bash Twine. There are only a small handful of early beta testers. Nova has said publicly that within 2 months or so they will open up the system to the 30,000 that have pre-registered to beta test. That is probably more than a lot of other web 2.0 early testing have allowed.
In answer to the above post, to learn more about how Twine is already supporting RDF, and making it visible, please view the Twine tour. The tour is public -- you don't have to be a beta user to view it.
http://www.twine.com/tour/overview
Please read the section on the Semantic Web, in particular.
Twine is in private invite-only beta not because we are elitist, but because the app is still in development and we want to test, learn, improve and scale in a manageable fashion before we open up more widely.
We are doing a true beta test here. The meaning of the term "beta" seems to have been lost in the last few years -- but we really do mean BETA in the original sense of the term. We don't mean 1.0 or 2.0, we really mean beta when we say beta.
Beta means that we are testing and learning, and not ready to make Twine a full General Availability app. Beta means there are bugs, incomplete features, rough edges, and a lot to improve. It's a construction site. But beta also means the app is usable and ready for testing and feedback from early adopters willing to roll up their sleeves, put on a hardhat, and explore.
As we expected, by letting in the press and more users, we are getting both positive and negative reviews. Some criticism from the likes of Marshall and others is quite constructive. This is the kind of feedback we want and need in order to make Twine better.
While we are in beta, if you really want access to Twine NOW and just can't wait until we invite more people in, just drop me an email and I'll get you into the beta. However, I ask that in return you promise to invest some time learning the app and participating in the community before you rush to judgment. And read the FAQs please. There is a lot more than meets the eye at first glance right now. We are working on making this more evident.
Right now we are not targeting consumers, we're targeting early adopters who want to try Twine out and help us make it into the best service it can be. Consumers will come later, and by then we will have resolved all of the issues that Marshall and others have pointed out. They are already on our list in fact.
Please join us and help out. And if you do, realize that there will be bugs. There will be incomplete features. But there is also be a lot of utility already there, and a great worldwide community of very smart people united to make Twine great.
If Twine can be, and I think it could be, a technology in the Semantic Web technology stack, it should allow me to do some excellent mashups with both data outside my firewall as well as data inside the firewall.
If the apis are two ways, I want to visualize, analyze and exploit Twine's capability to extract and define those semantic relationships. Let it be an aggregator of information and I can build tools/capabilities on top or alongside of Twine to reap the benefits of the semantic web.
Marshall,
Your view of the Semantic Web is somewhat inconsistent with the views that many others have, myself included. For instance, is there a correlation between Linked Data and the Semantic Web in your realm your Semantic Web comprehension?
I am asking a serious question here, becuase your evaluation of Twine has nothing to do with Twine as a Semantic Web application based on my understanding of the Semantic Web.
There is no "Web" if you are not Linking to something. If the thing you Link to is just another Opaque Resource (i.e data entities within the resource remain inaccessible via HTTP) without any mechanism for exposing data sources in RDF (when desired by a user agent), then I am sorry it isn't Semantic Web.
Of course, you can be Semantic, or Semantic Technology based, or even RDF and Semantic Web inside. The trouble with all the aforementioned is that they have nothing to do with the "Web" part of the "Semantic Web" as envison by TimBL.
Here are some simple things to look for in a Semantic Web:
1. Granular access to Data Objects via de-referencable URIs (IDs)
2. Use of Content Negotiation to Distill the data sources associated with a Web Document
3. Use of RDFa to embedd Data Object URIs inside Web Pages
4. Use of GRDDL to enable (X)HTML document publishers to authorize 3rd party transformation of XML into RDF via GRDDL processors (i.e. agents capable of using XSLT to produce RDF)
Even simpler, a Semantic Web application or platform will facilitate URIs such as:
1. http://community.linkeddata.org/dataspace/person/kidehen2#this (my Person Object ID/URI)
2. http://community.linkeddata.org/dataspace/person/kidehen2 (my Profile Page URL that describes the Person Object above)
Note:
When you place the URI (1) or URL (2) above into you normal browser you will see an HTML representation presented since that's what your browser requests. Once the page is loaded, take a look at the "Linked Data" tab, then follow the "Data Links" presented and then see the subtle shift that "Linked Data" provides over "Linked Documents".
Bottom line, if you can't get at the data behind (i.e. data sources) the information in a Web document, then you haven't made a shift beyond the Document Web. The Semantic Web is about fewer pages and lots of data links that deliver high degrees of serendiptousx exploration.
The Semantic Web vision is about open data access, data shaping, data shifting, and data meshing without the impedance of programming.
Remember, we are all "Beasts or Bias", so no information produced by any human (myself included) is devoid of bias. Thus, it's imporant that our main "Information Space" (the Web) also enables us to get at the data behind the information it serves up, so that we can generate and share alternative views and perspectives.
Kingsley Idehen
Marshal,
Thanks for sharing a great post. I've been beta testing Twine since November and have experienced many of the thoughts you chronicle. And for those that see this as kicking sand on Twine, It's not. The purpose of inviting in the press and others at this point is precisely to beat up on Twine. The foundation of Twine is being able to work with all that content, information, and data -- from wherever on the net, your desktop, your head -- treat it semantically, and help you and your group pursue your interests. The tag line is "tie it all together", so it's right to demand that this be done really well.
However, like Carla I draw a different conclusion. For me the glass is definitely more than half-full. I been seeing significant progress week to week. I haven't been so much chaffing at what is not there, but rather, have been enjoying what is there already. I have been getting significant value from Twine in areas that I am interested in.
And I'm having fun.
This is not to say that I don't want more. Like most of the heavy beta users I have visions of what else I'd like to be able to do with Twine. Like David Lewis, one of my favorite use case visions for Twine is a community semantic wiki for techno-socio collaboration. Another is as a collaborative framework for a semantic magazine and u-site aimed at educating the larger public. All the feature/functionality that I would like to see to support these ideas isn't there yet, but the foundations are apparent.
As a Twine user for several months, I'm quite excited about where this platform / service is going. Thanks for beating on Twine. The good news is that Twine is the real deal. It can take it. Now, watch it get better. Again, thanks for your review.
-- Mills Davis
Hi Marshall, subsequent to when you reviewed Imindi in its pre-alpha state 6 months or so ago, we are moving fast towards releasing our Beta version which I believe will be in many ways the alternative and useful Semantic Application that you are seeking.
Our approach at Imindi (An application built by a team of Phd computer and neuro scientists) is to take a "mind" approach to helping people to construct their own "mind maps" of connected thoughts and information on any subject.
These Mind Maps are little semantic webs that work "As we think" and the "Thought Engine" (Semantic Graph) at the core of Imindi enable Like Minded people (Social Graph) to connect and combine the Thoughts, Information and even Create Knowledge.
At the core, all the semantic linkages from every body`s public mind maps collape on themselves to form essentially one global mind map.
The closest vision to what we have built was not that of the Semantic Web, but that of the Memex by Vanevver Bush - but as we build a layer of thought and meaning over the information on the web...I would suggest that we are also very much a Semantic App worth watching.
http://www.imindi.com/journeys/382-semantic-web/maps/3195155-semantic-web