Most of My Blogging is Now in Twine

This is a note to readers of this blog. As many of you know, I'm the CEO of Radar Networks, the makers of a new service called Twine.

Twine is a service for "interest networking," which I believe is the next evolution of social media.

How are social networks and interest networks different?

• Social networks are about connecting to people and messaging with them -- they are basically the next evolution of contact management and email.
• Interest networks are about leveraging collective intelligence to discover and share great content around your interests -- they are the next evolution of social media (discussion forums, wikis, blogs, social news aggregation, and social bookmarking). Interest networks are for making sense of information and discovering new information that matters to you.

I now use Twine as my main place for authoring and sharing content on the Web. (I also use Twine as my main place for keeping up with my many interests. The Twine community does a great job of scouring the Web to find the content that I want to know about. Generally if there is an article that matters to me, it shows up in Twine very quickly. I no longer have to read as many RSS feeds. This is the power of collective intelligence at its best.)

However, although Twine can be used both to author and discover content around interest, in this article I will focus on the authoring side of the story.

Of course I am biased, but speaking from the perspective of a blogger, I can say that Twine is rapidly becoming the personal publishing environment I always dreamed of having. It's an ideal environment to author content and distribute it to highly relevant audiences.

In Twine, I have many different public and private microblogs on various topics that matter to me, and I also participate in microblogs that others have created. It's super easy to post to one or many of them at once.

Twine also has good support for discussions. It's very easy to have discussions around any piece of content -- and the discussions simply work better than they do in my Typepad blog. And of course, Twine has cool features such as automatic semantic tagging of all my posts, great content management features for finding all the content I have added, and powerful contextual recommendations to other interesting content that are added to my content.

As a result of these benefits, in the last month, I have found that my blogging activity in Twine has become about 100X my blogging activity here in Typepad (no offense to Typepad, by the way -- I really like Typepad too, but as a means of distributing content, it just isn't as useful to me as Twine).

Posting in a traditional blog is a labor intensive process and in the end my post only appears to the readers of one blog. But in Twine it is as easy as bookmarking something, or authoring a note, and then sharing it across a bunch of different communities. And Twine helps me keep track of the discussion around each of my posts as it evolves.

So if you are interested in what I'm reading, what I'm thinking about, and what matters to me, you'll find a lot more of that in Twine.

If you are not yet a Twine member already, register and you will be let in very quickly.

Here is where I hang out in Twine:

• Nova Spivack's Public Twine -- This is my blog in Twine, for general posts.
• Web 3.0 - Semantic Web -- This is a twine about, well, what the title says. There are thousands of participants.
• Cool -- This is a twine about unsually cool things. It's the Twine equivalent of Boing Boing. But instead of a small elite group controlling what gets in, the entire community helps.
• News of the Strange -- I admit it, I really like fringe news and odd news stories.
• Science Discoveries -- A twine about emerging discoveries in science.
• Web Industry Trends -- A twine about new ideas and trends in the Web biz.
• And many, many more... You can see them on my Profile in Twine.

And if you want to track all my public posts in Twine, go to my profile and subscribe to my RSS feed in Twine.

Twine is still in invite only beta -- but in the second half of July we will be opening up all the public content in Twine to the open Web. Anyone will be able to read it and we will be letting people in faster as well.

I will still blog here when I have larger articles to share. But on a day-to-day basis, I will be posting a lot more in Twine. Hope to see you there!

(By the way, if you are a member of Twine and you are also finding that Twine is becoming the center of your social media life, feel free to copy and paste this post and adapt it into your own blog)

Comments

[Milan]

I think that interest networks can't replace blogs, because the purpose of blogs is much wider. On the other hand, the concrete purpose of interest networks could drive people to create more content since they provide a suitable place for small texts related to a web resource (something not so favored by the blog paradigm).

The activity done on interest networks has actually the same motivation as writing professional blog articles (combined with social bookmarking), but is just better supported there.

It would be nice to think of other uses of blogs, for which we could create separate services.

[Greg Boutin]

Hi Nova,

So that's where your posts went...

This is a great post, showing how quickly Twine is progressing towards a unique value prop making use of the strength of semweb technologies and your engine. I particularly second your point on interest networks as a great evolution on social networks, and would encourage you to go down that road further, as I'm sure you do. The potential seems to be limitless, and it plays well to the strengths of semantic technologies.

Along those lines, here are a few suggestions for things I'd like to see in Twine, which in my eyes would add huge value to the app:

- The more you build on top of existing apps like Wordpress or Typepad, the better. I use Typepad too, and I'd like anything I type there to show up in my Twine blog, and vice-versa. An add-on to automate that in Typepad and Wordpress would be great in that regard. I have a feeling you're going to tell me this is already implemented...
- You may explore news way of displaying blogs in Twine, but please create an option to see your posts in the traditional display, with all your most recent posts already expanded, so I can take a quick look through as I did in Typepad. I haven't found such a view so far, maybe it's already in there.
- In the same vein, allowing me to link on LinkedIn and perhaps Facebook with my Twine contacts, to further the dialog to the social network arena, would really complement you. Like I believe you do, I don't think social networking threatens you, on the other hand, it really adds to the value of interest networking, and vice-versa.
- As a next step, I wonder how your technology could be used from step one in the creativity process, to facilitate the creation of blog posts itself. I can imagine that getting suggestions of existing pieces of tagged content as I type my post, would be a very useful thing to me and other bloggers.

If you allow me a short, related plug, I've recently gone independent after working as a marketing director in the semweb field, so if a go-to-market consultant would be something of use for Twine I'd be interested in helping out.

[shyam]

Nova,

While I greatly adore Twine and have been a user for a while, I would contend that it is far from the ideal personal publishing platform for the average Joe.

Eventually, you can't tie context to any particular platform (blogger, typepad, twine etc), which is why we are creating this huge hoopla about RDF and the semantic web. The day will come when all those will become nodes that publish data that other nodes can subscribe to.