Twine This!

Twine is a place to create and organize information. In its simplest interpretation it is a bookmarking tool.

It allows one to create new items of certain types: links, books, documents, videos, contacts, etc. But it is also more than that. In the extreme it can subsume blogs, homepages, wikis and to some extent search engines.

As opposed to a regular bookmark a twine item has a type and semantics associated with it.

I have some suggestions for improving Twine further, though

1. A twine item type; thus twines can become sets of elements from other twines (unions)
2. A twine item type designer; establish an item type ecosystem; with subtype reuse – create exponential growth (but constrain and sanity-check using rules)
3. A twine item type visual designer; create a visual template for an item type
4. A distinction between “my twines”, “my collaborative twines” and “other twines”; menus or submenus for each, making navigation easier; and the twinelet must take this distinction into account
5. A set of twine maps; visualizations of twine; heat maps (activity), geo maps (earth), topic maps (hot topics), taxonomies, etc; create mapping dimensions that slice twine in various ways of interest
6. A set of twine layouts; twine is a bit boring in its layout; create new views that allow one to display twines and items in grid layout
7. A blog item type
8. A mass bookmark import option and twine distribution based on analysis (see 11)
9. A set of dynamic layouts – use RIA technology (see 6,10)
10. A thin desktop application (Adobe AIR) – drag n drop, etc; intertwine twine with the personal computer/desktop; RIA applications respond faster and look better (drive in users in the millions)
11. A natural language parsing and indexing of items (Powerset secret sauce)
12. A broader focus on user-interaction; how might users interact and communicate
13. A statistics view; let users track how their items are growing and spreading
14. A roadmap or at least some public information about where twine is going for us beta chasers
15. A twine connection item type (do we have that?)
16. A geographical and temporal map of items (with type selection) and time slicing and motion (requires “RIA” technology); users as well (see 15)

Invest heavily in at least some of these goals; and do not forget the user-experience – make the users time to find and browse information a key metric for success.

There. Some of my thoughts on what Twine lacks to be truly compelling. There are more ideas, but they’ll come…