Twine: tying your online interests together

“Space,” The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

"Space," The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us, "is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space."

The same can be said of the Internet and, like with the Guide, you often need help to find your way. Enter Twine, a site that is part Google, part del.icio.us and part Facebook.

That range of foci makes defining Twine a little tricky. Essentially it’s a user-generated collection of online resources, organized by topic. Say you’re interested in sustainable living. Using Twine, you set up a micro site (called a Twine) on that topic and begin to aggregate information. Sources include bookmarks, links, photos, videos, PDFs, documents, etc. Each Twine also has its own e-mail address, allowing you to add information simply by e-mailing it off to the site. With a little work, the result is a small Web site created by you. To see this in action, check out the Sustainable Living Twine or drink in the Twine devoted to "The world’s oldest and most popular alcoholic beverage."

So far so good, but where the potential of Twine really takes off is as a social networking tool. You can make your Twine public so anyone can view it, discuss the topic and add their own information. This means Twine is also a social media platform, similar to Facebook but with some unique and useful functionality.

It’s that social networking component that could make Twine really successful, especially if businesses begin to use it the way they already have with Facebook.

The Twine folks have created one useful overview video and another that is entertaining, but NSFW.

Peter Wolchak
Backbone magazine

Filed Under: Web/Tech