Twine is one of the startups that is in my waiting list to be reviewed on TagEdge and I recently got a private beta access to it. It is a new Web application that applied the common semantic model, based on the fact that human experts are expensive, and users on Twine can provide valuable search and data information.

To understand what Twine does, and how it differentiate itself from any other Web application on the Web, you need to understand what semantic is. Semantic is refers to the computers’ ways to process the language or code, and understandable, experts usually correlate semantic to information management. But to understand semantic Web, the founder of Twine, has explained it, in a post, entitled, “On the Difference Between “Semantic” and “Semantic Web.” On Twine, what they do is to provide a semantic Web environment whereby a user is given a profile page, and the ability to social bookmark any link or URL address as she like, and Twine will do the rest with the new approach or concept of semantic analysis. Semantic analysis exists in helping you to interpret the information you put on your profile page, categorize, tag, summarize, abstract, and even extract similar link to the data information you like.

Perhaps this semantic technology is highly automated, and apparently not been easily understand by users who never came across this technology. However, the semantic technologies in existence is for the sake of the public. Perhaps you can consider it as a technology to help users create a data information library, discover all the bookmarks that you want to find out, but couldn’t achieve it by one’s own effort. With this technologies, it will grouping all the interest things, stuff in an organized way, and thus, we’ll realize the real relationships of these things with our lives. But expect there is a huge volume of data information out there on the Web, it’s always impossible for us to expect Twine will perform well barely in categorization, classification and tagging automatically on all the data users enter to the site, but more advance this technology evolve, the more it will understand human language, the perception on human towards language or computer code. In short, Twine was trying to make their system “smart” about the environment, but in practice, there’s still a lot of improvement that Twine will need to do, in viewed of many positive feedback, and some are negative out there.

To use Twine, upon you’ve been granted a private access, you’ll be given a profile page. Simply put, it’s like a social network, meet friends with similar interests, access to the data information collected from other Twine users, and join groups, etc. On the profile page, you’ve the options to talk about your latest status, what you’re doing right now, introduce yourself as well as list your own Web site on the page. You also provided with a notification page when there’s somebody would like to “connect” with you, and a Twine Digest for you to read as your everyday meal of information.

I like the fact Twine has provided a “Twine This” bookmarklet (drag it to the browser’s toolbar) that provide users to directly add a Web page they like onto their “My Items” of their profile pages. The another way is to email your favorite Web pages through with your own personal email address. All the Web pages you bookmarked are private, only if you purposely create your own public Twine, and add the Web pages you like to the public Twine, the bookmarks will be appeared as public in both “My Items” and public Twine. To illustrate this example, I’ve created a public Twine called “Startup to Watch.” To encourage users to share knowledge or information they came across on the Web, users are welcome to create as many Twines as they like, but manage those strategically. And be cautious you can’t change the URL address of your Twine as it’s impossible for a user to do it at this moment.

The core of semantic technologies is to find and expose content. To achieve this aim, Twine also allowed users to explore “Top 100 Twines”, “New Twines”, and “Top 100 Members.” From the Twines you discovered, you can find the articles, news you’re looking for a long period of time, but couldn’t find it other than Twine provided here. You also will meet some like-minded people in this platform. Meanwhile, there are several public twines that interested me, including the one created by Nova Spivack, Twine’s founder, Ruby on Rails, and Facebook research.

Twine is a project of Radar Networks, a startup based in San Francisco.