Twine – semantic web / knowledge management – first impressions

After being on the  waiting list since late 2007, I finally got my twine.com beta login just the other week.  I’ve been quite keen to have a look at twine as it’s been touting itself for some time now as one of the first true “semantic” applications for the web.

Twine’s stated aim is to enable people to share knowledge and information. In broad terms it’s an “intelligent” wiki that understands a lot more about the relationships between the information it holds.

Twine is about “Knowledge networking”, it aims to connect people with each other “for a purpose”. It’s not based around socializing, but to share and organize information users are interested in. Content can be added via wiki functionality, you can email content into the system, and “collect” something (as an object, e.g. a book object).

Other features of Twine include: RSS feeds to track all kinds of things (topics, events, search, etc); commenting and viewing related things, sharing tags, and the ability for users to import and export their own data. Twine has a kind of blog functionality which they call your own “twine”.

Where Twine is differentiated from the likes of wikipedia is that its underlying data structure is entirely Semantic Web. Twine uses the following Semantic Web technologies RDF, OWL, SPARQL, XSL.

At the moment there isn’t a lot of content in twine and maybe this is the biggest turn off to the casual user.  While it offers a great range of features and is really the kind of product that brings together most of what’s needed in a knowledge management solution, there is quite a big conceptual barrier to first time users and a lot of complexity is exposed on the surface.  I think it would be much better to offer a simple easy entry point with progressive layers of complexity as users get more into the system.  Google is the ultimate demonstration of this “progressive layers of complexity” approach.  Google have an incredible range of functionality on offer but the start point into their systems is deceptively simple.

I’m still debating whether I want to put in the effort to really start using twine as it’s a big commitment to start creating content in order to get something out of it.

There lies the rub, despit all the great functionality, if they can’t get users putting content into it then it’s not going to fulfil it’s potential.  Maybe it will end up being an online software solution for organisations looking to implement knowledgement management?  My first thoughts were that this might be a more appropriate use of the system as it currently stands, rather than a consumer focused web 2.0 application.