Raw

I just discovered within Twine a note from Nova asking for comments, here's my spur of the moment reply:

So far I like it, though still haven't really explored fully. Presentation is great, usability isn't bad at all, though probably not everything's as obvious as it could be. Feature-wise it's good, but I can imagine someone coming in and failing to see any advantages over say del.icio.us/Facebook. The USP I guess is the semweb angle, so maybe that should be brought to the surface more with alternate visualizations (show us the enTwining! give us shiny toys!). I'm sure the search box could be brightened up for starters :-) Then of course there's adding whatever low-hanging fruit you can under the hood - pulling stuff in (as you say), connecting to the linked data cloud, connecting to other interesting services (e.g. QDOS) and APIs APIs APIs: SPARQL with one of the update protocols, maybe Changesets, AtomPub, RDFa/microformats but most of all linkage as good web APIs are just web sites. A specific thing that would be nice to have and might also help generate buzz (through the DataPortability angle) would be some smarts around FOAF - subscribe to my remote profiles (poll them), feedlists and hCards etc, learn my friends & interests. As well as being able to suck in remote data, being able to expose one's profile with reasonably fine-grained private/public access control would be good. Related, something we really need - a sub-application really - would be a rich FOAF profile editor/manager/contact book.

I've still got some Twine beta invitations (though polished visually it is still a bona fide old-fashioned beta), mail me if you want one.

re. FOAF tools, I had a play with Henry's Beatnik Java app the other day - looking good, still a way to go before being a daily-use app, but already ok for demo purposes.