The recently unvieled Twine is a product of Radar Networks that lets you save, collaborate on, import, and export information about a set of objects: people, places, organizations, books, bookmarks, images, notes, videos, and so on. It will also do some smart filling-in-the-blanks on your behalf based on patterns it can find in the aggregate data. I have been hearing exciting things about Radar Networks for a while now thanks to Sean Ness at IFTF.
Twine looks like the smart, data-about-the-world version of what Jyri Engestrom calls object-oriented sociality, basically the idea that social networking sites excel when people can orient around objects, like photos (flickr), music (last.fm), videos (youtube).
I’ve been reading through all the of interesting posts about Twine. Lots of these also talk about the current field of meaning-making technologies – including Powerset and Freebase. Despite what anyone says about these companies vying for the same ring, I think it’s a good thing for users that companies are coming at the goal of making meaning on the web with radically different approaches.
There isn’t really a place in Twine for my use of Freebase, for instance. For my project, I wanted to share some specific knowledge about history and tap into the work of other careful data-modelers in doing so. I was able to make my contribution in a structured way at Freebase and on my own data-scheme terms.
Twine is going for more popular data (and I’m guessing therefore more money) by making it easy for regular people to keep track of information about their interests and their contacts. It looks to have the group functionality (save information as a team) and the user friendliness (bookmarklets, email forwarding) that Freebase doesn’t really need to offer. After all, Freebase has to be concerned about resolving entities to keep some purity of data.
And from my glimpse of Powerlabs, I think Powerset will find many uses for its natural language technology. I’m eager to see it applied to the large swaths of user-generated content – like blogs and Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers.
Here are some quotes from posts about Twine, etc.:
This really allows us to create a group diligence process that represents and leverages everything we, as a firm, know. It means I know can truly leverage the knowledge and relationships my partners accumulate. The enrichment means we all get more than we put in as we use the product. This basic process of structure knowledge capture and sharing is nearly universal in business, from major account sales processes to product design collaborations. We all know that email is fundamentally broken as knowledge capture, retention, and sharing tool.
Twine, Freebase and graph models vs relational models at ZDNet:
Freebase is more about a public database on the Web and Twine is more about an individual’s data,” Lew Tucker, CTO of Radar Networks and a Thinking Machines alumni, told me. “The underlying semantic Web technologies are similar, but we have different implementations. But, we are facing the same technical issues–how to handle the data because traditional databases don’t handle what we are doing well and the access patterns, dealing with data that is interconnected and linked. We are in an early stage of figuring out how to optimize the systems based on usage patterns. The exciting part is that we are trying to capture meaning, information in context.”
Danny Hillis on the graph model database at O’Reilly:
There are so many things you can do, so many ways you can organize. There are an embarrassment of options. Databases in general require an awful lot of thought up front. A committee decides the schema, and it’s inflexible after that. Most relational databases you design up front and live with the consequences. You have to devote energy to getting around the decisions you made up front. Free text dominated on the Internet. There was no database, just text. The center of what’s happening on the web is something between the two. Until recently, the only pattern was hyperlinks. Google mined that and accomplished a fantastic amount with that. Google showed how much help a little structure could bring to navigating things. Now Metaweb and others are seeing ways to bring in more structure, but not as much as a relational database where we have to agree before we get started. Tagging is one step away from a total non-structure. It’s an intermediate step.
Pictures of Twine at ReadWriteWeb.
Description at TechCrunch.
