Twine was an online,

social web The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social int ...

service for

information storage Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are conside ...

, authoring and discovery, located at twine.com, that existed from 2007 to 2010. It was created and run by

Radar Networks Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, weat ...

. The service was announced on October 19, 2007 and made open to the public on October 21, 2008. On March 11, 2010, Radar Networks was acquired by Evri Inc. along with Twine.com. On May 14, 2010, twine.com was shut down, becoming a redirect to evri.com. Twine combined features of

forum Forum or The Forum (plural forums or fora) may refer to: Common uses *Forum (legal), designated space for public expression in the United States *Forum (Roman), open public space within a Roman city **Roman Forum, most famous example *Internet ...

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

online database An online database is a database accessible from a local network or the Internet, as opposed to one that is stored locally on an individual computer or its attached storage (such as a CD). Online databases are hosted on websites, made available as s ...

s and

newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distin ...

s and employed intelligent software to automatically mine and store data relationships expressed using RDF statements.

Site description

Twine serviced

, authoring and discovery through its website and browser-based tools. The service, intended for regular web users, attempted to automate certain processes related to data categorization and keyword-association (tagging). The system employed

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to program computers to proc ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

to extract concepts from written text in user data, and expressed it using RDF triples tied to a semantic taxonomy based on concepts mined from Wikipedia. This makes it easier for machines to process the data. The extracted data could be used in searches to additionally select the type of thing the user wanted to find, such as ''person'' or ''location''. Twine was a

social network A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for ...

and its users could add contacts, send private messages and share information. Users could collaborate on collecting data through private or public ''twines''; data collections focused on a certain topic, such as politics. Data could be imported to Twine's website through conventional uploading of files, writing text with a

WYSIWYG editor In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

or using a

bookmark A bookmark is a thin marking tool, commonly made of card, leather, or fabric, used to keep track of a reader's progress in a book and allow the reader to easily return to where the previous reading session ended. Alternate materials for bo ...

ing tool for webpages. The tool worked similarly to other

social bookmarking Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social ...

websites. Users could manually write summaries, specify keywords (tags) and select an image to include in the bookmark that appears on Twine's website. Certain types of media in bookmarks, such as

YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second most ...

videos, were automatically embedded in Twine's pages when bookmarked. Twine also offered limited

capabilities to collaboratively edit documents. Information discovery was mostly done through a user's main page where items appeared, organized by the twine they belonged to. Twine also used

technologies that used semantic metadata to learn and generate more relevant, automatic information recommendations of possible interest to the user.

History

Radar Networks remained in stealth mode until October 19, 2007, when Twine was announced and limited invitations were handed out for

beta testing Software testing is the act of examining the artifacts and the behavior of the software under test by validation and verification. Software testing can also provide an objective, independent view of the software to allow the business to apprecia ...

. In February 2008 it was announced that Radar Networks raised a Series B

venture round A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among ...

led by Velocity Interactive Group, Vulcan Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. The service became visible to the public and search engines in July 2008. Approximately 50,000 people had signed up during Twine's beta-phase and 34,000 were active at that time. Twine went public on October 21, 2008. On March 11, 2010, the search engine Evri Inc. announced the acquisition of Radar Networks and Twine.com. On October 5, 2012, Evri laid off much of its staff and shut down its commercial offerings, including evri.com

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Twine (Website) Social networking services Social bookmarking Internet properties established in 2007 Internet properties disestablished in 2010 Social information processing Semantic Web Defunct websites

Site description

History

See also

References