I ventured into the world that is Twine.com today. Or I tried to anyways. I gotta tell ya I was confused and saddened by the experience.
I had been hearing a buzz about Twine and then with the recent article in WIRED, I thought this is the answer to all of our information overload whoas. Promises of revolution and pioneering of the Web 3.0 waters. I scored an invite from my old man. Logged in, followed the instructions to add a widget to my browser and then was dropped in the middle of someones PhD experiment? I tried to figure it out by poking around, which is my general (and thus far successful) way of exploring new technologies but sense, I could not make. The interface is laden with vocabulary that is unexplained (twine, collect, connect). Familiar terms become foreign (bookmark, recommend (how can you recommend this, I just got here)) Searching for a "twine" places you into a different interface than browsing for the same thing.
I turned to the help link, where the most prominent action is to send a help form. I dont want to send an email, I want to know what this is. With some focus I found my way into the help forum where the CEO directed inquirers to use the tutorials but also explained that the application was so complex that its taking a while to complete all the tutorials. Confusion turns to sadness.
So was Web 2.0 all buzz words, hype and high-profile, well-funded projects? Will Web 3.0 be? I hope not. I thought Web 2.0 was about affording social connections, opening up lines of communication, developing communities, making information more accessible to all. It was also about maturing the user interface, developing usability standards and ui patterns to provide consistent, predictable, intuitive interfaces. I do agree with Clive Thompson, and Radar Networks that the next phase in the evolution of the web will be about managing information and partnering semantic connections with our social ones and I am looking forward to being a part of that. But it might have to be another train that leads us there...
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1 comment:
I just discovered Twine this weekend, and compared it to at least a dozen other similar applications. I am convinced it is the best of all the ones I looked at for the purpose of maintaining and managing a lot of information long-term.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is currently an invite-only beta. Those who participate should probably realize that they are part of an ongoing development effort, and that their feedback is wanted to improve the system before it is made more generally available.
I watched a video interview by Scoble, and it gave me a good idea of how easy it can be to use:
first-look-semantic-web-app-twine
I am actually surprised how far along they are, and I hope this works out well very soon.
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