Raw

Twine is a new service for sharing, organizing and finding information with people you trust.

Nova Spivack's stealth semweb app has now launched as private beta, and he's been giving demos. Appropriately enough, there's a good write-up on O'Reilly's Radar. Quoted at Read/WriteWeb, Nova suggests it might be the First Mainstream Semantic Web App.

The screenshots look Facebookish, Freebasesque. Distinguishing features would appear to be first and foremost being based squarely on Semantic Web specs: RDF, OWL, SPARQL... Like Metaweb with Freebase, Radar Networks make a distinction between their platform and this application. This app seems to cover familiar parts of the graph - social networks, Wikipedia-oriented topics etc. But an interesting (and by the sounds of it fairly central) feature is the use of natural language understanding to recognise entities (and relationships?) in human text. Autogeneration of RDF from content? Cool, another whip for metacrap's back.

They have brought their release schedule forward so the use of the future tense in some of Nova's descriptions seem fair enough. I suspect it may take a while for them to get everything in place, but their attitude seems to strongly support open data. It'll be interesting to see how easily this system hooks up to the Linking Open Data cloud.

The announcement comes at the Web 2.0 Summit, and Paul Miller's been doing a grand job of blogging it. One comment, on Ghost (Global Hosted Operating System) I reckon is worth calling out in this context:

I'm all for computing in the cloud... but it seems silly to try to replicate replicate [sic] the desktop paradigm (with all its limitations) in a browser.

The purpose of a computer operating system is to enable useful applications to operate, which it does through resource and process management. While user interface is usually a necessary part of this, the distinction between OS and GUI often seems to get forgotten. On the Web, a platform like that behind Twine seems much closer to being a system for managing resources than the alleged Web OSs doing the rounds. After all, the browser is primarily a UI, the DOS prompt-like bootstrapper of the Web (although popular confusion between the usual UI and the system as whole is understandable).

There still seems to be a significant gap when it comes to process management, but setups like Yahoo! Pipes (actually a UI for Rohit's syndication-oriented architecture), renewed interest around Jabber, the growth of linked data and now Twine at least hint at approaches to wiring. Anyhoo, one step at a time, and best of luck to Radar Networks.

Must say I like the name Twine - I've got good associations with the word thanks to rural upbringing. Only thing is, I can't help but imagine it preceded by the word "bailer".

PS. The announcement is getting a lot of A-list buzz, appearing on Techmeme second only to Google quarterly profit swells 46 percent ( AI is alive and well...) but ahead of Robot Cannon Kills 9, Wounds 14 ( ...and potentially lethal). Pretty good I'd say (although the only other interesting story today would appear to be the release of Gutsy Gibbon).

@en