After less than a year, Radar Networks is going from beta to version 1.0 of its Twine "interest network" Web application based on Semantic Web technologies. "We are not spending four years in beta," said Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack. "We have a minimal set of features ready for prime time."
The minimal set of interest network features allows Twine users to track and discover relevant organizations, products, people, places, tags, and items, such as photos, documents, and recipes, that match their interests. Twine has a social dimension in the way it leverages the wisdom of its members, via bookmarking, tagging, and shared connections. Underlying Semantic Web technologies provide concept mapping (such as interrelationships between topics or people) and more relevant and structured search results.
In the last six months of beta testing, 500,000 users visited Twine and 50,000 remain active, Spivack said. Half of the Twines created are public and members have added about one million items to the database. "The most interesting statistic is time spent--which has risen in the last month to 12 minutes per session and continues to trend up. This is more than tracking and discovery sites like delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon receive," he claimed.
In order to keep the 50,000 active users and grow its base, the key change from the beta in version 1.0 is a simplification of the user experience. "When we started beta, Twine was about collecting, organizing, discovering, and sharing, and all were equal. It turns out that tracking interests is the most important, so that is what we are emphasizing," Spivack said. Among the more consumer friendly enhancements, the site navigation is streamlined, site performance is faster, moderation features are improved, users can invite people from their e-mail address books, and the recommendation engine explains why an item was recommended and allows a user to opt out.
The Semantic Web aspect of Twine, which was touted when it first launched, has been relegated to the background.
"When we first launched, semantic technology was the story," Spivack said. "It was novel then, but now we have to show the value, and to do that we can't emphasize the semantic technologies in Twine. It's under the hood and that is where it belongs. We surface the value of semantic in lots of ways, such as with the recommendations. Next year users will be able to create their own data types and build an ontology without knowing it's an ontology."
In about three weeks, an update to Twine 1.0 will add a more advanced bookmarking tool and natural language crawling to improve relevancy. "Every page added to Twine will use natural language processing to determine what is the content versus ads, navigation, and other elements. We'll put the full text in our search index and generate tags and create a summary and then crawl every link in the text one hop out and bring that content in as well," Spivack said.
Next year Twine will unleash more of its semantic power, with richer support for structured data and a two-way API for getting data in and out of Twine that will attract application developers, Spivack said. In addition, Twine will introduce a new monetization scheme. "Twine will be to marketing what Google was to advertising," he boasted.
"Advertising is pull-based, passive, and on the side of pages. Marketing is sponsored and highly relevant content that is targeted and delivered to someone in their in interest feeds. It will be clearly marked and users have to option to accept or reject it." The concept is similar to what Facebook has attempted to do with its Beacon program. Spivack said that company has filed patents for its monetization concepts, including a way for users to market semantic objects. "We can provide interesting socio-economics around the content that people collect, share, and buy, and build a one-to-one channel between marketers and users."
Radar Networks is in good shape to weather the economic storm. The company raised $13 million in Series B funding from Velocity Interactive, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Vulcan Capital earlier this year.
Below is a video from Radar Networks outlined the new features of Twine 1.0:
Twine Overview from Twine Official on Vimeo
In March, Radar Networks launched Twine, an application that organizes information and connects people, places, companies, products, Web pages, videos, and photos. Along with Metaweb's Freebase, Powerset (sold to Microsoft), Hakia, Reuters' Calias, AdaptiveBlue and a few other start-ups, Radar Networks is trying to crack the code on building a piece of the semantic Web.
In a Times Online article, Web creator Tim Berners-Lee gave an example of how the semantic Web would work:
"Imagine if two completely separate things--your bank statements and your calendar--spoke the same language and could share information with one another. You could drag one on top of the other and a whole bunch of dots would appear showing you when you spent your money."
Twine won't provide that futuristic capability but it attempts to build a "semantic graph" of relationships between content, tags, people and Twines (the collection of items of an individual or group on the service). Each piece of content is a "semantic object," Radar Networks CEO Nova Spivack said, using Twine's underlying ontology and database, which applies semantic technologies such as RDF for storing data.
Spivack told me that public Twines are now visible to visitors to the site and to search engines. So far in the beta phase nearly 15,000 Twines have been created and 354,000 pieces of user-contributed content have been added into the system. More than 50,000 users signed up (34,000 are active) for the service, spending 13 to 15 minutes per session on the site, he said.
A major new release of the Twine platform is slated for release in the fall to address shortcomings and introduce new features. "We have worked on a lot of simplification, reducing the clutter, and we still need to reduce more. Twine has a lot of powerful features nobody uses, so we are moving some of the advanced features out of the way," Spivack said. "The fall release will bring more intelligence and semantics to the surface. For example, we will let anyone define a new type of thing, such as a recipe or baseball team form, to author. It's more like what Freebase does, and we will also likely integrate with Freebase over time."
In addition, performance improvements and algorithms to improve search as well as mining and crawling content are in the works. "A major focus of our work is on personalization and recommendations," Spivack said. "Ultimately, Twine is about 'interest networking' and is a content distribution network. People declare their interests, add content, join Twines and connect with people. As users work with the system it learns about their interests, using artificial intelligence and semantic Web technologies to provide more relevance. We are not attempting to index the whole Web, just the best stuff of interest to users. Ninety-nine percent of what's on the Web is not interesting to a user, so it's more about high signal to noise."
On the business front, Spivack believes that Twine can be an intermediary for users, delivering more targeted marketing messages in addition to content. It's similar to the way Facebook is creating a new kind of environment for advertising based on knowing member interests and their social or semantic graph. "The goal for Twine is to be the place on the Web that best understands your interests and represents them to others. The key is to give users control and privacy," Spivack said.
Twine is a work in progress. It's ambitious and has the potential to demonstrate how a more semantic Web could benefit users. The biggest challenge will be scaling the back-end infrastructure and attracting users, which means Twine will have to become far more easy to configure and use. We'll see in the coming months whether the forthcoming changes to Twine help open the floodgates.
Updated numbers on users and usage, 6:30 AM PST, August 1
This one is worth waiting for: Twine. Still in private beta, at its most basic it is shared bookmarking service. It blends additional concepts from newsgroups, forums, social networking sites, online databases, and wikis. There's a lot of semantic Web theory (and technology) underneath the interface, which still needs to evolve a bit, but even in this early stage it's a compelling product.
Twine uses item metadata as well as natural-language processing to extract tags from items you enter.
Twine lets you create or participate in topic areas called "Twines." Users post Web addresses, photo and video links, files, and text comments into a Twine. Twine goes to work analyzing the items and automatically finding tags for them. For example, when I created a "Web 2.0 reviews" Twine and added Webware, it automatically tagged it "applications," "business," "silicon valley," and so forth, which are keywords that Webware.com pages has in its HTML source. The service also tries to divine meaning from the pages and add its own tags, and it attempts to figure out the people and the locations associated with an item, and put that information in as well.
From all these tags, including tags that you manually attach to stories, Twine will then look up items that it thinks you will be interested in, as well as other Twine members that have similarly-tagged items in their portfolios. It also uses the strength of your connections to various other members to weight item recommendations.
The upshot of this is that its recommendations should be pretty good. Immediately after I entered in my Webware link, Twine recommended to me a video of Eric Schmidt (Google's CEO), a review of the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad, and other items I thought I should definitely check out.
It's easy to get items into Twine. There's a bookmarklet that grabs URLs and images, and, if the item comes from a source such as Flickr, YouTube, or Amazon, additional metadata as well. You can also e-mail items into Twine, either to your own (or other peoples') Twine address or directly into a topic Twine.
Each item also gets a discussion thread, or you can make a discussion an item itself.
In a nutshell, Twine builds a semantic web (small w) from all the items, people, collections, and tags that are contributed to it. I think it does a killer job of weaving everything together. However, it's a rough cloth. The user interface appears straightforward at first, but it takes some study to understand what's going on and how to exploit it. As other writers have said, even at this early stage, with only 30,000 users, it's easy to see how Twine could contribute to personal information overload.
The database that Twine builds is as open as the company can make it. All pages can alternatively be viewed in machine-readable RDF format, and a two-way API is in the works. That's pretty cool, although Twine is neither a general-purpose social site such as Twitter nor a database such as Freebase, so I'm not sure who's going to bother creating applications for Twine. Though if the social aggregators (such as FriendFeed and Plaxo) want to do so, Twine's open strategy should make it easy.
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