My Impression of Twine 2.0

Radar Networks is about to release Twine 2.0. The CEO, Nova Spivack, had made a presentation of the coming T2. I include the video in the following. It takes less than 5 minutes and is worth of watching.



From the beginning, Twine is a service that I constantly study. I had written the first impression, the second impression, and Twine went public that shared my analysis of the service before its beta, in the beginning of its invitation-only beta, and when it went public, respectively. I would like to continue this tradition for the news of the T2 release.

In short, the T2 moves Twine closer to the realm of Web search in contrast to Web bookmarking, based on Nova's talk in the released video.

Although there is natural connection between bookmarking and search, the distinction between semantic bookmarking and semantic search is significant. Usually, through bookmarking we briefly store the Web pages in which we are interested. Then by search we may retrieve the particular Web page of interest out of the pool of bookmarked pages. But semantic bookmarking asks for the organization of the semantics only within a self-defined knowledge network, i.e., basically with respect to every individual user only. Semantic search, however, demands the organization of the semantics cross the varied knowledge networks, i.e., across the varied perspective of knowledge organization over multiple users. This distinction dramatically increases the degree of complexity of the problem. I am truly impressed by the new announcement. At the same time, however, I really feel doubt of how much Twine 2.0 could solve the problem.

I feel that Twine missed something critical in its progress. In the following I will try to explain my viewpoint of what it might have missed.

Within Twine, there are actually three layers of semantic representations, which I would call them the layer of the twines, the layer of the individual knowledge networks, and the layer of the overall knowledge network. As the names suggest, the layer of the overall knowledge network represents the entire knowledge stored in Twine.com, the layer of the individual knowledge networks is composed by individual users' personal knowledge networks, and the layer of the twines is composed by all the individual twines defined in Twine.com.

Until now, Twine 1.0 pays most of its attention to the layer of the twines. Based on Nova's video talk, Twine 2.0 will mostly dedicate to the layer of the overall knowledge network. The missing part is thus the layer of the individual knowledge networks.

Back to my first impression of Twine, I had highly praised Twine's effort on developing the personal knowledge networks. They should be the foundation of Twine in contrast to the twines. Although it sounds ironically, it is indeed reasonable because the twines are nothing but the links among the individual knowledge networks. It is indeed the individual knowledge networks, instead of the twines, that are truly what the users are interested.

Unfortunately, it seems that Twine jumps back and forth between the layer of the twines and the layer of the overall knowledge network. But it forgets the crucial one that is the real foundation on which a best-performing Twine must rely.

On the other hand, it is much more feasible for Twine to develop a good business model if it does semantic search rather than semantic bookmarking. I guess that this is the real motivation underneath.

I am still look forward to the service. However, I feel sorry that it chose to walk the most difficult way to go ahead rather than choosing the other less aggressive but more stable (and promising) ways of approaching.

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)

The future of Email

If there is a service that is used the most frequently by most of the Web users, it must be email. The invention of email is often thought to be the killer application of Internet. Without email, the adoption of Internet might have been delayed for several years.

Recently, however, email seems facing a little bit challenge. With the rise of new services such as instant message, wiki, Twitter, and all kinds of social networking functions, email is already no longer the solely primary choice for online communication. How should email be improved to satisfy the rapidly evolving Web?

First of all, we should not try to construct some super-email service that integrates all kinds of new service functions from IM to social networking. It would be a monster too heavy for users to drive, as Alex Iskold pointed out in his post.

Here are a few features I believe a new-generation email should be equipped. Email does not have to replace the other services. But email does need to improve itself.

editable after sent

Twine builds a very useful feature in its email service---users may edit its already-sent email. At least to me, this is a great feature. I am not sure how many of you have the experience that you want to revise an email just sent out. I often have. I believe that the feeling is especially regular among writers whose mother tongue is not English.

Moreover, many time I feel that I may only catch certain error after it is officially sent. This feeling might be based on some psychological reasons. But anyway, sending out an email containing improper verses or uncaught typos is not only embarrassing but some time also deadly if the email is important such as a job application.

Therefore, an upgraded email service should allow the senders to be able to revise and update their sent messages, especially before the mail being opened by the receivers. Twine is ahead on this service. But there are certainly other ways to solve the problem besides Twine's solution. For instance, we may simply allow users to send a new message to "replace" an old sent message. If the sent message has not been opened yet, the server can simply "replace" the old one by the new message; or otherwise, the sender may notice the server either deliver the "replacing" message as a normal new message or omit it totally.

I would suggest such a feature called "replace" be a new basic email function side-by-side with send and obtain emails.

tagging

Gmail allows users to label received emails. But why not encourage email senders to tag their messages at the first place? The title of email could not say much. With sender-generated tags, however, it greatly helps receivers filter their messages. And it also helps catch spammers when they abuse tags.

video email channels

A problem of combining video with email is that video files are often too big for emails to carry. But why videos must be sent. With the tagging function I just mentioned, regular email services may open a separate video email channel that allows people to record and listen to video emails. The regular email can simply be used to exchange the entry-point of the message in the channel with tags so that receivers may know what the shared channel is about.

Summary

There are actually more thoughts but I am a little bit tired of blogging more. One certain thing is, however, that we do expect a new-generation email as many other analysts have mentioned (see the referenced resources).

If only we may open our mind and think proactively, innovation is everywhere. Thinking Space is a place of creative thinking. I always believe that the value of a person is not mainly about what he has thought out. By contrast, the true value of a person is about what he is capable of active thinking and thus be able to continuously invent new ideas. Again, this human ability is the value of mind asset, a gift that every human being owns but only through everlasting practices it becomes more and more valuable.

Referenced resources:

• Wikipedia: Email
  
• Is email in danger? (Read/WriteWeb)
• I freed myself from E-Mail’s grip, (The New York Times)
• Email to fizzle out in five years? (Internet Evolution)
• Email is the enemy (ZDNet)
• How Gmail blocks spam (Google Operating System)
  

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 public profile

Just noticed that Twine has released open profiles of its users. Check here for my profile at Twine. But I think Twine should at least send an email to its users to alert them that their profiles have now been public.

The initial signal of Web 3.0

For more than a year, I have studied the laws of Web evolution. A few news in recent months have already made me think whether the transition towards the next generation Web (or Web 3.0) has started. Finally, a break news at the last weekend becomes the last straw.

This break news is about Jason Calacanis' official announcement of retirement from blogging. For readers who are not familiar to him, Jason is a symbolic person in the Web 2.0 age. He founded Weblogs Inc. and Mahalo.com. He has also joined Sequoia Capital and organized TechCrunch50 together with Michael Arrington. Although I do not agree to their argument that "DEMO needs to die," it does not decrease any of my respect to either Jason or Michael. They are visionary pioneers who always make big actions. With such a background, I would like to ask the objective meaning (in contrast to subjective thoughts) of Jason's retirement from blogging statement with respect to Web evolution.

To answer the question, there are a few other "coincidental" events we need to watch altogether. Here are they.

    a) the prevalence of the general idea of Data Portability

    b) the emergence of companies that start to "rethink" the Web such as Imindi and Genome

    c) more Web celebrities who start moving away from the traditional blogosphere such as Nova Spivack

I claim that there are intrinsic coherence beneath these seemly irrelevant news, i.e., the transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 has started. This interpretation tells the unconsciousness side of Jason Calacanis' action of retirement. Maybe Jason himself has not been consciously known, his action is an initial signal of a stage transition in Web evolution.

Data portability intends to solve the central problem in the Web 2.0 infrastructure---managing the ever-increasing quantity of Web 2.0 resources. Too many duplications of online information (especially such as the duplicated personal identities in varied subscribed Web 2.0 sites) have gradually cause more and more troubles for both of the individual users and Web industrial companies. With the implementation of data portability, we may solve most of the data duplication issues and significant release the pressure of Web object identification.

If we project data portability onto Web industry, it is more than opening up platforms or publishing APIs. By contrast, it demands rethinking of the basic infrastructure of the Web. Data portability will remodel the Web from a gigantic platform (2.0 stage) to a uniform playground (3.0 stage). The process is similar to that asynchronous data processing remodeled the Web from a generic file system (1.0 stage) to a gigantic platform. Both Imindi and Genome are trying to develop a new form of products grounded upon the new thinking, which make them be different from the other Web 2.0 peers. However, I am certain that there must be more new rethinking in the stealth mode besides the two I know.

On the other hand, if we project data portability onto individual practices on the Web, we are going to see the transformation of Web spaces from blog (2.0 stage) to the next form (3.0 stage), which is similar to the transformation from homepages (1.0 stage) to blogs. Both Jason and Nova claimed that they would adopt another form of Web space besides blog to communicate with people. Jason said that it would be a new form mail list and Nova claimed it to be Twine. If we look at these two forms in details, Jason's solution focuses more on privacy, distraction from time wasting, and higher quality of communication. Nova's solution focuses more on uniform control over various identities. Both points are related to the problems Vlad discussed in his Genome proposal. What a coincidence!

Probably Jason is just tired of continuing to blog for too many readers and Nova is just trying to advertise the product of his company. But unconsciously their actions have illustrated one thing---we are entering a new transitional period from Web 2.0 to 3.0 now. Web 2.0 is about to be passed.

YokWay moves forward

Invited by Stephan Osmont, co-founder of YokWay, I did a try on this new service about collaborative bookmarking.

In the few months, we have seen several new services on bookmarking and online data management. The hottest buzz right now is Twine and FriendFeed. The less known YokWay, however, has the potential to be a serious competitor.

The YokWay service allows people to share their bookmarked items with friends. Yokway adopts the Digg fashion that requires users to post items one at a time instead of the fashion of FriendFeed that automatically pulls items for users through subscribed RSS services.

Once an item is posted, it is categorized into "What's Yoking?", which is similar to such as "What's dugg?" or "What's twined?" Users can conveniently switch the viewing perspective among the Yokings made by themselves, by their specified friends, or by the general public. YokWay allows users to add comments for an item and to vote for the items based on an scale up to five stars.

One thing that sets YokWay apart from Digg is to organize stored items with topics. YokWay calls them "My Sharing Circles". Anybody can create a new "Sharing Circle". And anybody can choose to "subscribe" to an existing circle and/or "join" an existing circle. By "subscribe", readers choose to follow the topic without the privilege of posting on the topic. By "join", readers ask for the right of posting on this topic. The request of "subscribe" is granted immediately when it is asked. By contrast, the request of "join" must be approved by the owner of the circle.

The sharing circles in YokWay is semantically identical to the twines in Twine. But the implemented functions of sharing circles is weaker than those of twines. By using Twine, we can flexibly specific tags in various categories and easily share items among twines. YokWay has not provided such a strong flexibility. In fact, during my test it is even not straightforward for me to add an existing item to a newly created circle. YokWay must need to enhance the implementation of these functions in order to engage more users.

In the email, Stephan emphasizes to me that YokWay is "sharing information relies on a best of breed semantic engine that will make Yokway a potential leader in the Web 3.0 era." I am impressed by the claim but the beta service has not clearly illustrated how the new semantic technologies have been engaged in use. For example, tagging is weakly supported by YokWay. Automatic machine tagging is a particular demonstration of performing semantic technologies in a Web document management system. But I cannot find this demonstration in the current YokWay beta service, let it alone the other more complicated use of semantic technologies.

As what I have suggested for Twine, new service providers must think of innovative ways to illustrate the use of new technologies through creative user interface design. Otherwise, users can hardly be impressed by the new technologies when they cannot feel. Twine has this problem in this architecture. YokWay, however, has even more problems on this issue. It seems that YokWay tries to produce a better Web-resource-management service by mixing several of the good design issues made by Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed altogether. This type of mixing is a good strategy unless the designers themselves already have a unique vision over the topic. Otherwise, it is easier to be a compromise that the service itself loses its identity. Such a problem of losing identity is a deadly issue for any new service. Unfortunately, however, I feel that YokWay has this problem in serious.

Final Address

In summary, YokWay is a new service for managing data on the Web. It tries to integrate many handy existing Web services into a uniform platform so that users can get the best experiences on organizing their Web resources through the service. I must confess that the service is so far so good on its main goal and it actually provides several really impressive features such as the integration of Google Map service within comments.

Besides all the good things YokWay provides for users, the most severe problem of YokWay at this moment is the lack of identity. The service is not impressive in its architecture comparing to its direct competitors such as Digg, Twine, and FriendFeed. YokWay tries to include all the good features of its competitors but eventually it loses its own uniqueness. When I use YokWay, I can see that this feature likes Twine and another feature likes FriendFeed. But I would like to ask what the identity of YokWay is.

The most crucial thing for YokWay at this moment is to hire a truly visionary thinker to direct the design of a new architecture. Through my testing, I am certain that YokWay has good enough technology to support its growth. A visionary thinker may immediately leverage the service to a distinctive level by forming an impressive identity for the service.

Twine Invitation Available

I still have a few (about 20) Twine invitations to give away. If you want one, please leave a comment and I will send an invitation to you. If you don't know what Twine is, here are my first impression and second impression.

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.)

Multi-layer Abstractions: World Wide Web or Giant Global Graph or Others

(the compact version of this article is cross-posted at ZDNet)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee blogged again. This time he invented another new term---Giant Global Graph. Sir Tim uses GGG to describe Internet in a new abstraction layer that is different from either the Net layer abstraction or the Web layer abstraction. Quite a few technique blogs immediately reported this news in this Thanksgiving weekend. I am afraid, however, that few of them really told readers the deeper meaning of this new GGG. To me, this is a signal from the father of World Wide Web: the Web (or the information on Internet) has started to be reorganized from the traditional publisher-oriented structure to the new viewer-oriented structure. This claim from Sir Tim Berners-Lee well matches my previous predictions of web evolution.

Why another layer?

We need to look at a question---why do we need another layer of abstraction of Internet? The answer: when all the previous abstractions are no longer sufficient enough to foster the newest evolution of Internet. Based on Sir Tim, we previously had two typical abstractions of Internet layers. The first layer of abstraction is called the Net, in which Internet is a network of computers. The second layer of abstraction is called the Web, in which Internet is a network of documents. After these two abstractions, Sir Tim now declare the third layer of abstraction named the Graph, in which Internet is a network of individual social graphs.

We are all familiar to the Net layer of Internet, which Sir Tim also call the International Information Infrastructure (III). Whenever we buy a new computer and link it online, this computer automatically becomes a part of the III. Through this computer, humans can access information stored in all the other computers within the III. Simultaneously, the information stored in this new computer become generally accessible by all the other computers within the III. This abstraction layer is particularly useful when we discuss information transformation protocols on Internet.

The Web layer of Internet is often called the World Wide Web (WWW). "It isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting." Most of the time human users only care of information itself but not on which computers the information is physically stored. Whenever somebody uploads a piece of information online, this information automatically becomes a part of the WWW. In general, a piece of information holds its unalterable meaning that is independent to whether it is physically stored in computer A or computer B. This abstraction layer is particularly useful when we discuss general information manipulation on Internet.

Are these two abstractions enough for us to explore all the potential of Internet? Sir Tim answers no, and I agree. The Internet evolution continuously brings us new challenges. As I had pointed out in my series of web evolution, the primary contradiction on the Web is always the contradiction between unbounded quantitative accumulation of web resources and limited resource-operating mechanism at the meantime. We continuously require newer web-resource-operation mechanisms to solve this primary contradiction at a new level. The newer resource-operation mechanisms, however, are reflections of the newer abstraction layers of Internet. In particular to the Web 2.0, this primary contradiction is shown as the continuously increased amount of individually tagged information and the lack of ability to coherently organize them together. The concept of social graph is helpful to solve this contradiction.

Both Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold presented the same observation: every individual web user expects to have an organized social graph of web information in which they are interested. Independently, I had another presentation but about the same meaning. The term I had used was web space. Due to current status of web evolution, web users are going to look for integrating their explored web information of interest into a personal cyberspace---web space. Inside each web space, information is organized as a social graph based on the perspective of the owner of the web space. This is thus the connection between the web spaces under my interpretation and the social graphs under the interpretation of Brad and Alex. Note that this web-space interpretation reveals another implicit but important aspect: the major role of an web-space owner is a web viewer instead of a web publisher.

The emergence of this new Graph abstraction of Internet tells that the Web (or information on Internet) is now evolving from a publisher-oriented structure to a viewer-oriented structure. At the Web layer, every web page shows an information organization based on the view of its publishers. Web viewers generally have no control on how web information should be organized. So the Web layer is upon a publisher-oriented structure. At the new proposed Graph layer, every social graph shows an information organization based on the view of graph owners, who are primarily the web viewers. In general, web publishers have little impact on how these social graphs should be composed. "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important." Who are going to answer what are "the things they are about"? It is the viewers instead of the publishers who will answer. This is why information organization at the Graph layer becomes viewer-oriented. The composition of all viewer-oriented social graphs becomes a giant graph at the global scale that is equivalent to the World Wide Web (but based on a varied view); this giant composition is thus the Giant Global Graph (GGG).

More Discussion

Turning from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web is a fascinating transformation. Based on the view of web evolution, the core of this transformation is the upgrade of web spaces.

• On Web 1.0, web spaces were homepages. Homepages typically represented the publishers' view. So Web 1.0 was a publisher-oriented web.


• On Web 2.0, web spaces become individual accounts. Web 2.0 is in a transition from the publisher-oriented web to the viewer-oriented web. Individual accounts are representative units of this transition. Within an account, web viewers collect resources of interest and store them into the account. So these accounts contain significant viewer-oriented aspects. On the other hand, these accounts are isolated in varied web sites, which are typical information organizations built upon the publisher-oriented view. Therefore, individual accounts on these particular sites must inevitably also contain significant publisher-oriented aspects. Such a mixture between the two views causes more problems than benefits. Users feel difficult to organize information across the boundary of web sites.


• On the future Web 3.0, web spaces will become primarily viewer-oriented. In contrast to the Web-2.0 accounts, Web-3.0 spaces (or graphs) are going to be a collection of web resources from various web sites that are organized essentially based on the view of web viewers. Web-3.0 spaces will become viewer-side home-spaces in contract to the publisher-side home-pages on Web 1.0.

This vision of viewer-oriented web is exciting. But is there anything else still missing in this vision? If the things we have discussed until now were all we need, Twine would have been the example of our ultimate solution towards the Web 3.0. But I also have analyzed that Twine (or at least the current Twine Beta) was at most Web 2.5. There is still a missing piece in this vision.

The missing piece is the character of proactivity. In my web evolution article, I have emphasized that the implementation of proactivity is a key for the next transition on web evolution. Unlike the publishers who can fully control of whether and what they should publish, viewers have no control on either of these questions. Therefore, a successful viewer-oriented information organization must be equipped with certain proactive mechanisms so that viewers can continuously update their social graphs by newly uploaded web information. Similar to that the implementation of activity (such as RSS) was a key to the success of Web 2.0, the implementation of proactivity will be a key to the success of Web 3.0, or Semantic Web, or the new proposed Giant Global Graph.

Current Status of Web Evolution by Watching Web 2.0 Summit

The 2007 Web 2.0 Summit conference has come to its end. Richard MacManus at Read/WriteWeb has summarized the conference by saying that this conference is a success but lack of a focused theme. By contrast, he listed a timeline of Web 2.0 as follows.

       * Oct '04: Web 2.0 is Born
       * Oct '05: Web 2.0 Tips (a.k.a. "cautious optimism and cynical buzz")
       * Nov '06: Web 2.0 Matures
       * Apr '07: Web 2.0 Goes Mainstream

I, however, made a complement to this timeline.

       * Oct '07: Web 2.0 Starts to be flourishing

Impression of Web 2.0 Summit 2007

Web 2.0 is starting to be flourishing! This is the most important signal delivered by this Web 2.0 Summit 2007. Technologies are ready, and it's time to exploit human creativity on manipulating these technologies. This is what this conference tells the world.

That Web 2.0 is starting to be flourishing explains why it seems that this conference is short of a focused theme. Web 2.0 is now going everywhere. Different people are thinking of how to apply this vision to their professional realms and make profits from this hype. It thus causes the diversity of topics, and so the theme is hard to be focused.

But, isn't the lack of a theme itself also a theme? Yes, it is. Diversity dominates this conference. People all talk about themselves. It is short of extra energy to care of a common theme to everyone. This is the sign of being flourishing.

Current Status from the View of Web Evolution

So what does this current status mean? I want to share my view based on my vision of web evolution. I have three predictions based on the observation of this Web 2.0 Summit.

1. We are now at the stage of rapid quantitative accumulation of Web-2.0 resources.

The core technologies of Web 2.0 mature. The rest of the work is how to maximize the usage of these technologies. From traditional big boys such as Microsoft to numerous small startups, everyone is trying their own way to dig gold from this Web 2.0 hype. In the following few year, we are going to see tremendous increase of quantity of Web-2.0 resources on the Web. Now it is the best to produce revenue from Web-2.0 products.

2. The preparation of transition to Web 3.0 has begun.

I emphasize that it is the preparation but not the transition itself. At present online Web-2.0 resources are still too few on both its quantity and diversity to really trigger the next transition. As we know, sufficient quantitative accumulation is the prerequisite of a qualitative transition. The general philosophical theory tells us that a qualitative transition can never happen without such a sufficient quantitative accumulation, and certainly we are not there yet.

This observation tells why Twine is still only a Web-2.0 or at most a Web-2.5 product but not a true Web-3.0 product. In some sense, Twine likes an early-born baby and the entire environment has not been ready to its healthy growth yet. But Twine is a sign that Web 3.0 is ahead.

3. Web-2.0 bubble is unavoidable, but probably it is also necessary.

In order to accelerate the emergence of Web 3.0, we need more Web-2.0 companies (instead of more Web-3.0 startups) at present. It sounds controversy. But remember that no Web-3.0 companies can exist before the world of Web 2.0 has been flourishing enough. Since no one knows how much flourishing is enough, only over-flourishing can tell us that it has already been enough. By over-flourishing, we get a bubble. This is thus the dilemma.

Web 2.0 stands on the flourishing world of Web 1.0, and it was so flourishing that caused a bubble. Similarly, Web 3.0 must stand on the flourishing world of Web 2.0, and there is no other way to make Web 3.0 happen. By this mean, Web-2.0 bubble is not only unavoidable, but also necessary. In order to survive from this coming bubble, however, any ambitious Web-2.0 company must prepare its own shift from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 when at present it is still focusing on producing Web-2.0 products.

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!
  
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• 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.