It's been quite a while since I signed up for the Twine Beta. It's been an interesting experience. I only really started using it a few days ago, and already I can see what they're aiming at.
What is Twine? Well, it claims to be the first Social Networking site built on Semantic Web technology. It basically allows you to post (and tag) almost any content (bookmarks, images, videos, audio and so forth) and share that content with other Twine users. Twine will analyze your item and, using a special algorithm, it will add tags relevant to the content. Doesn't sound so special? Well, take a look at this...
What you're looking at is what a normal user would see (sorry for the small image sizes), and then that same page drawn as a graph generated from RDF. This can be done with almost anything on Twine, by simply appending ?rdf to the end of the url. What this does is give you machine-readable RDF output. It's pretty nifty. More than that, it gives the platform enormous potential for mash-ups, data-mining and very efficient search...and that's only scratching the surface of the thing.
Sure, the site itself still has quite a few issues (I am happy to say that they sorted out a huge bug caused by proxy servers very quickly). The user interface is not very intuitive, there's the very real danger of information overload and there are small aspects that can be vastly improved, but you have to realize that Twine is still in beta. They actually seem to listen to feedback. If they manage to sort most of it out, once it goes public it should be pretty revolutionary.
It's great to actually see the Semantic Web in action, flaws and all. In fact, I'm thinking of using some of the principles used in the creation of Twine for my University Web Development project that's coming up. It's also going to help a great deal if I get to do my research project on the topic of my choice.
I still have quite a few invites for the Twine beta (all of them, in fact). If you'd like one, let me know in the comments. I'll send it to the e-mail address you supply.
