Twine for Networking Based on your Interests
I readily admit that the phrase “interest networking” sounds like Dilbert-speak to me. But I’ve been playing with Twine for a while (www.twine.com) and it seems appropriate to describe the experience as finding interests you have in common with other people. However, I don’t think its strength lies in networking because I still haven’t found how to import my contact lists to see who else I know on Twine. I guess I expected that feature because other new-ish networking tools like Plurk gave me that option.
I also tend to automatically correlate Twine with Twitter, even though the only thing they have in common is the first two letters of their name. I was first alerted to Twine from someone I follow on Twitter, so I suppose that’s the connection that’s stuck in my mind.
Twine is in private beta right now, but all you need to do is enter your information to request an invitation. I requested mine back in June and got it immediately. This invite-type beta is a way of artificially inflating the cool factor, but it is in fact cool because it seems to add a social net to the finding of content. Their value pitch is “organize, share, and discover information around your interests.” In my experimentation with Twine, it seems like Twine helps you find web content that communities have chosen. For example, entering “wiki” gave me some articles that the usual net I cast hadn’t found yet, some even from the early 2000s. Try a search with your interests and see what you find - I’d love to hear your experience with Twine.
Twine’s tagline is “Twine takes everything you’re into and ties it all together.” So far, I’d like it to tie my “peeps” and various other networks together a little better, but I think I need to have it tie my interests together instead.
