Twine and information design
Jinfo Blog

27th March 2008

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Twine, a semantic Web application, was announced last October. Now with well over 30’000 interested individuals in the queue to get into as beta users, Twine opened up for some limited previews earlier this month. A lot of interesting discussions followed, including a critical review on ReadWriteWeb http://digbig.com/4wqgt and Twine’s response http://digbig.com/4wqgq. While Twine’s own Web site twine.com leaves a new visitor somewhat puzzled about what it is, Technology Review’s article http://digbig.com/4wqhj titled “The semantic Web goes mainstream” did a good job telling the story: “Twine is a website where people can dump information that’s important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the Web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received, and so on. Once Twine has some information, it starts to analyze it and automatically sort it into categories that include the people involved, concepts discussed, and places, organizations, and companies. This way, when a user is searching for something, she can have quick access to related information about it. Twine also uses elements of social networking so that a user has access to information collected by others in her network.” In other words, Twine aims to connect people and information in context, and to share and organize relevant information intelligently. What makes Twine promising is its underlying semantic Web technologies (see a good overview at http://digbig.com/4wqhh). Indeed the technologies are full of hope and the Twine idea is great, however getting the product right is hard. Twine has repeatedly declared that it is still in beta and it will improve over time. As far as the preview user feedback goes, one major unsatisfying thing seemed to be around information orientation, i.e. the user interface and information design – with so much information of all sorts that a typical Twine user can store, manage, find and use within a Twine, good user experience design will be critical to the success of the product. In addition to relying heavily on user feedback from technology visionaries and software developers, how would it be if Twine seeks support from information professionals who have tremendous insight and skills in dealing with massive amount of information?

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