Twine went public

Finally, Twine went out of beta.

To introduce this service, in Thinking Space I had written two pieces (first impression and second impression) of post that were synchronized with Twine's steps of going public. I am interested in this service because it is a representative Semantic Web application until now. After talking and debating Semantic Web for so many years, Twine is among the very few successful (or at least workable) real-world Semantic Web applications. Just by this mean, it deserves our special attention.

For readers who are still not familiar to Twine, Paul Miller had a fairly comprehensive discussion of the service at ZDNet that is worth of reading. Also, you may directly go for Twine.com to try the service by yourself. In this post, however, I continue my style of service analysis following the first impression and second impression.

The up side of the public version

1) from producing knowledge networks to producing interest networks

I vote this update of mind to be positive. Knowledge network is a great concept. Producing knowledge networks is probably the ultimate goal of Semantic Web. However, this intent is too broad to manage. How to project this broad concept of knowledge network onto a narrower and easier-to-manage alternative is a challenge. I am glad that Nova seems figuring out one---interest network.

Personal interest is a subset of personal knowledge. Moreover, personal interest is probably the most heavily cared portion of personal knowledge. By reducing knowledge network to interest network, it decreases the amount of potential information processing and narrows the size of the application domain. Hence it could significant improve the performance of the service if the service designers truly understand the meaning of this change.

2) emphasized personalization and privacy

Nova has emphasized that "What Twine will be doing will be to make excellent PERSONALIZED AND TOTALLY PERSONAL AND PRIVATE recommendations to users." Moreover, Nova mentioned that Twine would monetize its service through the coupling of recommendation and privacy protection. I agree to Nova. This is the right direction.

3) enthusiasm of the users

Nova reported that at present Twine users spend 12 minutes per session on average. This is a very encouraging number. It means that the service is sticky in some sense, or at least among the ones who really use the service it is sticky.

4) good quality of content

I use Twine regularly. Based on my experience, the quality of bookmarking service Twine currently performs is fairly good. When I search information inside a twine, the quality of searched results is satisfactory in general.

The down side of the public version

1) move towards 2.0 rather than to 3.0

I was said that Twine was likely a Web 2.5 application in its beta. Then I expected that Twine would gradually move towards 3.0 when it went public. However, my prediction is wrong. By inspecting this public version Twine, it is more similar to the other Web 2.0 applications than becoming a revolutionary new service. In the other words, Twine is moving towards 2.0 rather than to 3.0.

At the beginning we might instantly tell the difference between Twine and another standard Web 2.0 service. But now it has been very hard to tell why Twine is not another Web 2.0 application. By just adding a few semantic computation is not enough for Twine to claim Web 3.0.

Twine needs to hire some visionary service manager in contrast to (or in addition to) the experienced service manager it has now. By experienced Twine could only go for what is popular now. Only by visionary Twine might lead the trend into the future. Twine is losing innovation.

2) too low traffic flow in monthly visits

Based on the information provided by the CrunchBase, the number of Twine.com's monthly unique visitors at the past September is only about 50K. Be note that Thinking Space has monthly unique visitors in the same September more than 5K. In this month, the unique visitors at Thinking Space is close to 10K. But Thinking Space has no invested money at all, with respect to Twine.com has $13 million only in its series B round of fund raising. Isn't it a serious problem of Twine?



Referenced resources:

• Twine: the first impression (Thinking Space)
  
• Twine: the second impression (Thinking Space)
  
• Radar Networks opens Twine to the world with version 1.0 (by Paul Miller)
  
• Interest Networks (by Nova Spivack)
• Twine not launching a "Beacon like system" (by Nova Spivack)

Why do we bookmark?

The newly updated delicious.com (former del.icio.us) has brought people another round of interest about social bookmarking. Nova Spivack, the founder and CEO of RN/Twine, just posted his thought of the topic in his public Twine. After reading it, I still want to ask a question: why do we bookmark?

According to Mathew Ingram, bookmarking should already have been out of fashion. Once people have bookmarked a few links using social bookmarking services such as delicious.com, how many times do they really go back and watch their bookmarked items again? Based on Mathew's observation, the answer is very few and nearly to zero. Then the immediate conclusion must be that bookmarking is generally nothing but wasting of time. What value may we gain from bookmarking when we actually never watch the items bookmarked?

To response to Mathew's argument, Nova suggested Twine---his own baby---by saying that Twine will actually bring the experience of bookmarking to another level. Hence bookmarking is not about to die. By contrast, bookmarking is about to evolve.

I agree to Nova about evolution of bookmarking. Bookmarking is still a useful and valuable generic function that many Web users look for. There is just too much useful information on the Web and by nature our brains simply cannot remember everything. Bookmarking is always valuable but it also does need to evolve since the current bookmarking technology simply does not meet users' expectation. Is Twine really the solution as Nova advocates?

I don't want to make any judgment. Instead, I just want to share some experiences on how I handle my bookmarked items.

As many others, I often bookmark. I have used several bookmarking tools, from the most traditional IE and Firefox bookmarks to Furl to MyBookmarks to Digg to Twine to Google Reader. Weird that I have never really used delicious (I have a login on the site, however) even though it is the most popular service in this category for quite a long time. Google Reader + Twine + Firefox 3.0 bookmarks + Blogger is the best combination I have experienced until now though it is still far less than being satisfied.

In general, this is what I do.

1) Using Google Reader to grasp potential information of interest, staring the items that I do feel interesting.

2) Using Twine to categorize the items that are interesting, the majority of which is from the stared ones in Google Reader and a few others from random reading on the Web.

3) Using Firefox 3.0 bookmarks to record only the few links that I do frequently browse, access, or reference.

4) Writing blog posts (primarily it is at here Thinking Space though there are a few others places) that digest the bookmarked items into my own thoughts. After blogging, I will delete the bookmarked items from my list since they have already been part of my own thinking.

The reason I explains this process in this detail is to derive an answer for the question I raised at the beginning: why do we bookmark?

My answer is: I bookmark to absorb others' thoughts and turn them to be my own knowledge. Hence a real revolutionary bookmarking service should contain all the four steps I just mentioned but not just any one of them.

An ideal bookmarking service should have (1) an information collecting pipe such as Google Reader, (2) an information categorization and crude digest unit such as Twine, (3) an information winnowing repository such as Firefox 3.0 bookmarks, and (4) an eventual information refining factory such as Blogger. This is how bookmarking can really be useful and Mathew would never complain again.

Again, does anybody sense the term "mind asset" emerged again in this paradigm? Maybe it is a joking. I do feel, however, that someone would better having me help produce such a service. In fact, it could be revolutionary if one does have the vision of mind asset or it might be just another mixture of existing services---novel but not illuminating enough (and hence hardly be a great business success).

Referenced resources:

• the next evolution of bookmark---beyond Del.icio.us?
• who bookmarks any more?

Twine: the second impression

Thanks John Munro for referring me an invitation to test Twine. As I promised earlier, I would write a follow-up post discussing more pros and cons of this novel product. So here am I.

Review of the Goal

In the first impression of Twine, I have unfolded the goal of Twine into four aspects. Hence in this test, I would like to go over the four aspects and see whether the current beta version has reached the goal.

1) Twine produces knowledge network.

The design of Twine follows a pattern: (1) initiate a twine, (2) add items into the twine, and (3) specify tags for every item. Comparing to the standard Web-2.0 design that each item (such as a blog post, a YouTube video, or a Flickr photo) is associated with multiple tags, Twine adds an additional layer upon items that is named "twine". A twine represents a more generalized categorization over the individual topics of items.

We should not overlook this new level of knowledge abstraction represented by "twines". This design shows a significant jump forward on knowledge representation. With the standard Web-2.0 design, all tags are equally weighted. For instance, there is no weight difference between the tags "Twine" and "Web 2.0" that I have specified for this blog post. It is, however, technically difficult for machines to mine structured information out of all these evenly weighted social tags. With the new Twine design, the topics of twines weight differently from the ordinary social tags that are associated with specific items. For instance, I could have created a twine with the topic "Twine" and then I have added this blog post as an item to this twine and assigned the tag "Web 2.0" for the item. By this specification, "Web 2.0" becomes a feature that describes the topic "Twine" in contrast to a peer-to-peer social tag with respect to each other. Hence we have obtained richer, hierarchical semantics for knowledge representation based on human behaviors. This type of machine-processable hierarchical information is the basis for the coming Semantic Web.

In short, this beta version has met the baseline of creating knowledge networks by Twine.

2) The knowledge networks produced by Twine are personalized.

All the stored items in Twine are placed inside a personal space of users. Unless explicitly claimed to be public, the stored items or twines are private and can only be checked by the owner. Nova Spivack once emphasized that "in Twine, about 50% of the content is actually NOT public but rather is personal to individuals or shared in private groups." So Twine has really been designed priorly for personalized knowledge management in contrast to public knowledge share.

In the post of first impression, I have questioned that whether the personalization of knowledge networks could across the boundary of individual networks. The current beta version has not yet provided a clear answer to this question. In the beta, it is not straightforward for users to watch the topology of their individual knowledge networks. Thus it is difficult to precisely tell the communication between different knowledge networks. Radar Networks would want to resolve this issue in the future.

On the other hand, however, I would rather suggest that Radar Networks be careful on supporting knowledge sharing among varied knowledge networks. Without a solid reasoning mechanism underneath, knowledge sharing across network boundaries could significantly decreases the precision of semantic search. The difference between semantic search within a single knowledge network and semantic search across multiple knowledge networks is that the latter case requires a much better solution on data mapping while the former case may bypass this extremely difficult issue.

3) A knowledge network in Twine allows users to find, share, and organize information.

In this beta version, it seems that Twine supports only keyword-based search. The current UI design suggests that Radar Networks is working on semantics-based complex search. But the semantic search has not yet come to live. We may expect more advanced search to be added into Twine in the future.

On the issue of knowledge organization, Radar Networks claims that Twine can automatically produce tags for newly added items by parsing their titles, content, and authors. This process is a typical semantic analysis; and thus Twine is declared to be a Semantic-Web application. A problem is, however, that "it doesn't work very well," said by Marshall Kirkpatrick a month ago. Maybe both Marshall and I have expected too much from Twine at the beginning and thus we both become a little bit disappointed on the testing results of this beta version.

During my test, I have added this blog into a twine and see how Twine suggests tags for the new item. Unfortunately Twine suggests only two tags---blog and Yihong, where the first one identifies the new item is a blog and the second one is my login name at Twine. Apparently the underneath engine has done nothing on parsing the content of this blog. In order to test more, I tried to add another new item---my Web-1.0 style homepage and see whether the original mistake is caused by a Web-2.0 input. As this time, Twine suggested also only two tags---Yihong and Web-1, where the first one is my login name at Twine and the second one is my specified name for the item I just added. Again, apparently no content parsing has been done. These simple tests show that there are still many bugs in this beta version.

4) Information in a knowledge network is from people who are trusted by the owners of the knowledge network.

It seems that this beta version has been equipped with a basic mechanism of trust that allows the owners of twines to decide membership. Since the quality of knowledge networks is closely related to the degree of trust that has been implemented, we should expect more sophisticated mechanism of trust implemented in the later versions of Twine. This issue might not be so critical as the others for a beta service.

In summary, this beta version has generally met the fundamental declarations Radar Networks made originally. Is this Twine beta a Semantic-Web service now? Not yet. But it certainly leads us a correct way to the Semantic Web. In my opinion, the contribution of this Twine beta is more on an attempt to construct a semantic web than on providing the world the first semantic-web application.

Three Suggestions to Improve Twine

It is still a long way for Radar Networks to have Twine be "the first mainstream Semantic Web application". I have three suggestion for Radar Networks to improve this Twine service.

Above all, Twine should not be looked like a "del.icio.us 2.0", and indeed Twine is beyond an upgraded del.icio.us. Up to the date, however, most of the comments I have seen about Twine have addressed Twine to be a new-generation bookmarking service, or in the other words a new-generation del.icio.us. Nevertheless bookmarking is a way of using Twine, Twine is much more than bookmarking. Twine is designed to produce real knowledge networks.

A critical task for the Twine management team is to design a service of viewing and managing the topology of individual knowledge networks. A visual display of knowledge networks is necessary for Twine users to issue reasonable semantic search queries in the future (if Twine goes for this direction). Unlike del.icio.us that only supports a flat structure of tags, Twine allows hierarchical knowledge specification. It is, however, not straightforward for users to issue good semantic queries unless they can have a broad view of all items bound to a particular twine. This augmentation will eventually let Twine be out of the shadow of del.icio.us.

Second, Twine needs to learn more from Squidoo, whose motto is that "everyone's an expert on something." I have been with this motto for long time and it is part of my vision of web evolution. More importantly, I sincerely believe that this motto fits perfect to Twine.

There is a basic question Radar Networks should think of Twine: what does a twine really mean to its creator? Is a twine a garbage collector to the creator as someone has suggested in one of the comments to Marshall's post? Surely a garbage collector is not be the original plot. But the challenge is, however, that how to prevent Twine from being garbage collectors. This motto of Squidoo provides an answer.

A twine should be a place where a user can demonstrate his/her expertise on whatever something. In order to realize this goal and minimize the attempts of using Twine to be garbage collectors, Radar Networks should develop delicate algorithms for users to define the scope of a twine and to be able to clean the items inside a twine. With these functions, Twine can continuously keep users being with it and really build a well-structured semantic web based on the user practices.

The last but not the least, data portability is an issue Radar Networks must consider for Twine. Since the primary goal of Twine is to help users organize private knowledge space, Radar Networks should allow users to transport their twines to their other preferred locations such as local PCs, and also allow users to upload their locally organized twines back to the remote servers maintained by Radar Networks. This capability of data portability would extend the usage of Twine by prompting the service being not only an online resource organizer but also a resource organizer that private users themselves have fully controlled either online or offline.

Final Address

Twine is an impressive new service. Although it is not yet a true Semantic-Web application, it is a demonstration that we are moving towards Semantic Web. At present, Twine is still at its very early stage. There are still many pieces missed in the current beta version. But I am confident that Radar Networks is working on these missing issues and we can expect a much better Twine service in the future.

(You may be interested in watching the previous post in this topic, Twine: the first impression.)

Twine, the first impression

One big news flying over the blogosphere this past weekend is the first public announcement of Twine. Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb asked whether it is the first mainstream Semantic Web application.

I have not gotten the chance to test the beta myself yet, and I know that neither do many of my readers too at this moment. By analyzing released information in various blogs, I would like to share my first impression of Twine. I may post a follow-up of this post later when I get to know better about Twine. Unless otherwise mentioned, the figures used in this post are from the references I cite at the end of this post.

Twine in a nutshell

This is my one-sentence impression on what Twine is after reading all the referenced posts.

Twine produces a personalized knowledge network for every user by allowing them to find, share, and organize information from people they trust.

As usual, I unfold this sentence so that we may peek the core of Twine.

Twine produces knowledge network. This is the main goal of Twine. That a knowledge network versus a normal social network is What-You-Know versus Who-You-Know. Peter Rip had a fairly well explanation of this issue.

The knowledge networks produced by Twine are personalized. This clause actually has two folds of meanings. If we only read these words, it tells that Twine leverages the management of personal knowledge and improves the usage of knowledge for individual users. If we think of this expression deeper, very likely the knowledge management inside Twines may hardly run across the boundaries of individual knowledge networks at the semantic level. In fact, "personalization" is a comparatively weak term in the realm of knowledge management because globalization is much harder than personalization. But certainly this claim from Twine is reasonable and understandable. (It would be less believable if Twine claims that it could effectively manage knowledge across all the knowledge networks.) Indeed I have already been very much impressed on this claim Twine has made.

A knowledge network in Twine allows users to find, share, and organize information. The keyword in this clause is users, i.e. humans find, share, and organize (with help from machines) rather than machines find, share, and organize. It shows that we are still half way to the real Semantic Web.

Information in a knowledge network is from people who are trusted by the owners of the knowledge network. Obviously, the quality of any knowledge network is related to the quality of its content. The quality of content is, however, related to whether the information providers are trustworthy. Recently, Paul Miller and I had a talk and both of us also agreed that the trust issue must be fundamental to any form of networks on the future Web. Obviously Twine has already addressed this issue for its knowledge networks. How does Twine actually has modeled and implemented trust? This is an interesting question waiting to be revealed.

Impressions from Released Screen-shots

Now we look at two screen-shots and take a close feeling about Twine.



The first screen-shot shows a standard front page of a Twine. The design is familiar to other Web 2.0 sites. The page contains various imports, which could be seen as widget components. On the right side, there are standard tags and list of friends. In general, this screen-shot hardly reveals why Twine is more than another Web 2.0 site.

I am a little bit disappointed about this front-page design. The most important shortcoming is that there is lack of new thought in the design. It is hard to convince me that this site is a new-generation product as it is advertised.



This second screen-shot reveals something new. Typically, it shows an automated annotation mechanism behind the screen. It seems that the Radar's semantic engine can automatically annotate new imports based on existing user-specified tags. Annotated data are stored in RDF files, as Twine is advertised. The interface does not reveal whether there is an underlying ontology management mechanism that may automatically upgrade taxonomies based on users' activities. From the pragmatic point of view, I guess that there might be pre-constructed small ontologies or taxonomies (e.g. learned from Wikipedia) in Radar's semantic engine. Based on user-specified tags, the Radar's semantic engine can automatically (or semi-automatically) select proper taxonomies for users. Then these taxonomies become the seeds for further annotation and query requests.

This screen-shot demonstrates that Twine is beginning to distinguish itself from the other Web-2.0 products. The integration of semantic-web technologies brings new elements to the design and further enriches user experiences on leveraging web information management.

From the two screen-shots, we have seen the use of novel semantic web technologies in Twine. The main problem is, however, that Twine seems only mechanically lay the techniques together. What is the philosophy underneath these techniques and what kind of revolution can these improvement bring to the world? Unfortunately, Twine does not provide a clear answer. As the result, "Twine looks like it's just del.icio.us 2.0," quoted from Tim O'Reilly's comment for his own post about Twine. This is also exactly my feeling after carefully reading all the discussions about Twine up to now.

Semantics behind Twine

Which philosophy does Twine want to bring to the world? This is the grand question to Radar Networks and Nova Spivack.

What I can see is that Twine is still aiming to leverage a web of platform. Certainly this goal is timely and exciting at this moment. But if Twine stops its goal only at the web of platform, Twine is not (and will not be) a Web-3.0 product as it is advertised. Twine is an excellent Web-2.0 product; or maybe we could call it a Web-2.5 product because it shows inevitable distinction to many other Web-2.0 products. But unfortunately, it is not a Web-3.0 product because Twine so far does not bring us revolutionary thoughts. Web 3.0 is more than just a plain layout of new technologies. Web 3.0 must be a revolutionary layout of new technologies. A revolutionary layout means to bring a new philosophy to the world; but Twine fails in this ultimate goal.

To understand revolution, let's compare the current Twine to the Google when it was risen and we can understand the lack of Twine at present. The greatness of Google is not because of its PageRank algorithm. Nevertheless is the algorithm a magnificent contribution to the world, Google changes the philosophy of the Web. Google redefined itself to be a center hub of a social network of users who use Google products instead of defining itself to be a traditional entry-portal to the Web. This upgrade of philosophy lifts Google from a 1.0 company to a leading 2.0 company. This is called revolution. So far Twine has not shown a sign of this type of revolution. By the way, I am not sure whether Yahoo had really understood this revolution until now.

If Radar Networks would like to welcome my comments, I would suggest changing the name "Twine" to "Twin". Check dictionary again if you are curious of these two words. Email me if you really want to know my opinion, which is hard to be explained in short sentences and out of the focus of this post. (Certainly I do not insist on literally changing the name. But they'd better change the philosophy underneath the name if their goal is really about Web 3.0.)

Summary

Twine is an exciting product. Although this Twine beta is not a Web-3.0 product yet, it is already one of the greatest Web-2.0 products up to the present. Moreover, we must not neglect that Twine still has a huge space to grow before it gets out of its beta version. Twine has the potential to grow to be a real Web-3.0 product. The question is what kind of ultimate philosophy Nova Spivack and his peers are preparing to bring to the world. Let's be optimistic to the future of Twine.

References

• Twine official website, Twine Introduction
  
• Nova Spivack (founder of Radar Networks), What a Week!
  
• ==================================================
  
• Danny Ayers, Radar Networks decloak: Twine
  
• Nicholas Carr, Twine: a social network with brains
  
• Dan Farber, Radar Networks weaves semantic Twine
  
• Martin LaMonica, Radar Networks' Twine: Semantic Web meets information overload
  
• Brad Linder, Twine: A social network built on the semantic web dls interview
  
• Richard MacManus, Twine: The First Mainstream Semantic Web App?
  
• Paul Miller, Web 2.0 Summit - tying it all together with Twine
  
• Chris Morrison, Radar’s Twine: A semantic complement to Google
  
• Tim O'Reilly, Web2Summit: Radar Networks Unwinds twine.com
  
• Shelly Powers, Semantic to Go
  
• Peter Rip, Initial Experience with Twine
  
• Julie Sloane, Radar Networks To Unveil Its Semantic Web App, Twine
  

Many other related discussions can be found at here.

Semantic Web is closer to be real, isn't it or is it?

A recent post by technical evangelist Robert Scoble brought a small hype of semantic web again. His article was about the new achievement done by Radar Networks, which was founded by Nova Spivack. The following is quoted by Robert's post.

Basically Web pages will no longer be just pages, or posts. They’ll all be split up into little objects, stored in a database (a massive, scalable one at that) and then your words can be displayed in different ways. Imagine a really awesome search engine that could bring back much much more granular stuff than Google can today. Or, heck, imagine you could view my blog by posts with most inbound links.

Robert have expressed his excitement about watching the semantic web demo with Nova. Although I have not gotten the chance to experience it by myself, I can briefly feel what is going on and which technologies Radar Networks is now employing. This expressed scenario is a certain picture that current semantic web technology can support. Here at our research lab at BYU, we cooperate with some DERI researchers together and work on a project about enabling the semantic web to be real. In fact, the paradigm of our plan is close to the scenario that is expressed by Robert. So I feel familiar when I watch Robert's expressions.

The idea of semantic web has been discussed for years. The web is certainly moving towards holding more and more machine-processable semantics. But until now, the research of semantic web is still mostly limited in labs. What are the reasons?

According to our beliefs, the reason is not due to technical difficulties. Technical difficulties are severe problems, but not the deadly ones. The real difficulty is about who are going to take the control of semantic definitions. Are these definitions controlled by few elites or by the public? This is a grand question.

Many people have predicted the rise of "semantic Google." But I would say that there would never be a "semantic Google." Again, my argument is not due to the technical reasons. The problem is about who is going to be the owner of such a "semantic Google." If it is a US company, I must say sorry to it that countries such as China, Russia, or even European Union would ban it and build their own semantic giants because any major country in this world would not endure its "semantics" being controlled in the hand of another country. This type of threats is intolerant to any independent country.

In fact, we may even not need to raise this problem to the level of nations. Even within individual persons, no one would like to be forced agreeing on the semantics defined by another person. This semantic-definition problem is indeed the most crucial problem to the prevalence of the semantic web.

What is the solution? In fact, the success of Web 2.0 has shown a pragmatic resolution. We need to allow the public to define semantics by themselves. This is the only way that can promise the prevalence of semantic web. Any web user can apply his machine agent to understand the web based on his own understanding. This is what a pragmatic semantic web should deliver. On such a pragmatic semantic web, no "semantic Google" can exist due to the massive diversity of human understanding. A collaborative web search model will replace the current centralized search model. In fact, we have invented a new theory of collaborative web search on the semantic web, and hopefully it could be released soon.

In summary, Nova Spivack and his company Radar Networks have done great achievement on realizing the semantic web. We must congratulate them! Great work, Nova! On the other hand, however, unless they can show that their solution has properly solved the semantic definition problem, the age of semantic web is still not there yet.