Twine Does The Work For You
How often have you wasted time searching through page after page of e-mail messages, Web sites, notes, news feeds, and YouTube videos on your computer, trying to find an important item?
Although I am pretty organized, sometimes even my organization skills need a little help. A company in San Francisco, Radar Networks, is testing a free, Web-based application, called Twine, which may provide some robotic secretarial help in organizing and retrieving documents. How?
Twine can scan almost any electronic document for the names of people, places, businesses and many other entities that its algorithms recognize. Then it does something remarkable: it automatically tags or marks all of these items in orange and transfers them to an index on the right side of the screen. This index grows with every document you view, as the program adds subjects that it can recognize or infer from their context.
They can make their collections, or “twines,” private, share them in groups with other members having common interests like politics or Technology, or even make the twines public. For instance, people planning a trip to Japan (something I would like to do) could send all the Google maps, articles, and travel guide Web pages they are collecting to Twine. As each document is added, Twine automatically tags items and adds them to the database for the trip, compiling an index with references.
Twine’s organizational abilities have enthused excitement among some early users, and quite a few people are on the waiting list to try it out, I am sure. Unfortunately, it is still in private beta, but they are gradually opening up invitations accordingly. The site will be free to regular users, although there may be premium content as well, to keep finances high. Additional features and services will most likely be for a cost and supported through advertisements in the meantime.
Although Twine is focusing on teams and professionals, Twin does not deny individuals the ability to have a little fun too. With the help of Taskbin combined with Twine, I think you may have the ultimate organization tools regardless whether or not you are a professional or part of a team.
