Readers of this blog know about my fascination with the structured, distributed web and open data, and the role the semantic web can play on that web. This fascination has reached a point where I ended up reversing a decision I made a few years ago about walking away from programming and honing my skills and knowledge in strategic concepts.
I have long felt that Twine occupies an important in the future of the Semantic Web. Unlike technology platforms like Freebase or Talis, Twine is an application that abstracts away the technology, an essential step in the widespread adoption of the Semantic Web. I have argued that in a perfect world, the end user does not really need know that they are functioning on the Semantic Web, but rather just feel the impact of a power powerful backend. However, in order for the developer (and investor) community to embrace that idea we need applications that are built on top of an RDF infrastructure and bring to people powerful functionality derived from the Semantic backend. Usability and functionality will be a key, and this is why so much rides on the success of Twine. It has mindshare, it has guns trained on it, and the last thing one wants is for Twine to fall into the Hype and Naysayers trap.
Plus, if I get into something (Lijit is an example), you won’t find too many people better to provide constructive criticism
Here are some recent posts about metadata, the Semantic Web and Twine
They're definitely playing it safe. It's got a ways to go in terms of usability. I'll post my own review once I have built up a sufficient network and content.
The way I look at it, look at it as an application that extracts entity information from your content and uses that to build a graph of linked data (under the hood) and serve up recommendations and content based on that. It reminds me of Calais to a degree, but it's meant to be an application and not a service (at least at this point). Will be very interesting to see how it evolves.
Why I should get a beta for Twine?
Nova Spivack asks the question and here is my response.
Readers of this blog know about my fascination with the structured, distributed web and open data, and the role the semantic web can play on that web. This fascination has reached a point where I ended up reversing a decision I made a few years ago about walking away from programming and honing my skills and knowledge in strategic concepts.
I have long felt that Twine occupies an important in the future of the Semantic Web. Unlike technology platforms like Freebase or Talis, Twine is an application that abstracts away the technology, an essential step in the widespread adoption of the Semantic Web. I have argued that in a perfect world, the end user does not really need know that they are functioning on the Semantic Web, but rather just feel the impact of a power powerful backend. However, in order for the developer (and investor) community to embrace that idea we need applications that are built on top of an RDF infrastructure and bring to people powerful functionality derived from the Semantic backend. Usability and functionality will be a key, and this is why so much rides on the success of Twine. It has mindshare, it has guns trained on it, and the last thing one wants is for Twine to fall into the Hype and Naysayers trap.
Plus, if I get into something (Lijit is an example), you won’t find too many people better to provide constructive criticism
Here are some recent posts about metadata, the Semantic Web and Twine
Technorati Tags: Twine, Semantic Web, Nova Spivack