Social Media – What Is Twine?

May 14th, 2009

by John R. Sedivy

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While maintaining this blog I monitor traffic fairly closely to include web traffic sources. The other day I noticed a new site which I had not previously encountered that had provided us with a few new visitors. The website is Twine and I will provide an overview of Twine in this article.

Twine – Tying It All Together
According to the Twine website, Twine is explained as the following:

“A new way to collect content and connect with people who share your interests. Use Twine to track, find, and share what interests you. Twine ties it all together by topic, so you can have it all in one place.”

While browsing Twine it appears that it is a social bookmarking site which allows you to group or “twine” individual articles to a collective group. For example, a reader of ours had placed our “Synchronicity 101″ article in a Synchronicity Twine – see below:

Twine Screen Capture

Once the items is Twined, visitors may view the article and comment. In addition, through a “Share And Collect” function the user can accomplish the following:

1. Add this to my items
2. Share with my twines
3. Share with my connections
4. Share with email address
5. Tweet via Twitter

Furthermore, there are other functions such as “Related Items”, “Tags”, and “Who’s Interested In This?” available. “Related Items” provides a listing of other like items, for example, our reader who bookmarked CCBuzz also had two other synchronicity articles titled “Divine Contenders Wolfgang Pauli and the Symmetry of the World” and “Synchronicity and Acausal Connectedness” bookmarked – this allows a reader interested in this subject to easily access other synchronicity based articles and even add to the twine.

“Tags” allow one to add categories to a given twine to allow for easy organization of information for later search and retrieval. Finally, the “Who’s Interested In This?” feature provides a list of individuals who are interested in a listed twine. This allows the user to view and potentially network with other individuals who are interested in a given twine should they choose to do so.

Other Bundled Features
Other functionality included in Twine as described by their website is as follows:

1. Interest Feed - Allows the user to track and discover new content by providing a snapshot of the newest content and conversations in individual twines. Similar to a blog it allows you to keep up to date via e-mail or RSS.
2. Bookmarking - The main purpose of the site – share your content, whether text, pictures, or videos with the Twine community. Twines of similar interest allow you to gain more information in your subject matter of interest and connect with others of like interest.
3. Organization – Twine automatically organizes content and allows for the import of bookmarks from browsers and other websites.
4. Connect – Meet new people with similar interests! Twine seems to be built around groups of people with quirky interests. It makes sense that our synchronicity article made the cut when compared to our other offerings.
5. Recommendations - A feature that makes content recommendations to you based upon your viewing habits. Reminds me of the TiVo recommendation feature which recommends shows based on previous viewing habits.
6. Twine Creation – Allows a user to start their own twine and add to the knowledge base. The easiest and fastest way to become part of a community is to participate.

One of the greatest aspects of the Internet is that it is always changing and evolving. With each new day I am learning more without having to look too far – in this instance my own web traffic reports! Twine is an example of a social bookmarking site that resembles other sites such as Delicious, but appears to attempt to carve a niche for themselves in quirky topics such as synchronicity. The advantage of writing a blog with a wide variety of topics is it exposes us to new communities and opens up new worlds – this is one such example.

Twine attempts to bind users through the common interest of quirky topics!

-John R. Sedivy of Cape Cod Branding