I’m considering selling a few of my augmented reality domains; originally intended to be put to use, other projects have gotten in the way. It seems a shame to leave them parked. So, here they are.

The domain list

Make an offer

Contact me directly to make me an offer on any of these domains. I intend to keep prices fair. I want to see them go to deserving individuals and startups.

I reserve the right to accept or deny offers based on personal preference.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Layar’s augmented reality to go 3D in November [Videos]
2. Useful augmented reality tool shipped by US Postal Service

Layar 3D makes use of OpenGL, the accelerometer, the GPS and the compass of the phone. Developers can place 3D objects in their content layers based on coordinates. Objects can be optimized in size and orientation to create an immersive and realistic experience. The 3D capabilities support live downloading and rendering of 3D objects. Actions such as “open link” or “play music” can be assigned to 3D objects. [Press release]

Looking forward to early results from the minds of their developers.

Embedded videos after the jump

Boeing 747 flyby

3D tagging in augmented reality

Arcade game animation (Pac-Man)

Links & references

• Layar’s main website
• Layar’s 3D demo page
• Layar’s press release (Sept. 22nd, 2009)

Automatic recommendations:

1. Layar’s Augmented Reality Web for mobiles: finally layered information
2. Augmented reality games, but what’s reality doing there?

Correct prediction

Undetermined

Wrong prediction

Today we’re launching a special page to store past and present predictions regarding future technology developments. At the moment all are in the area of augmented reality. Below is a list of new predictions; the complete list can be found on the new Predictions page. The page can also be accessed through its link in Think Artificial’s header-menu.

What do you predict? =)

Year 2009

Initial iPhone development and app popularity

• Prediction on August 28th, 2009: In October 2009 many developers are reported working on augmented reality apps for iPhone. This is partially due to the success of 5 wildly popular apps in the iPhone App Store.

Year 2010

Rise of serious augmented reality apps

• Prediction on August 28th, 2009: In January, 2010 interest in fluff (useless, silly) applications is declining. Much more powerful, serious AR apps are on the rise.

Major stores adopt augmented reality

• Prediction on August 28th, 2009: In January, 2010 the first major store announces mobile AR support; possibly an app that indicates product locations in shelves, or one that shows information about products. There are rumors of at least 3 other stores preparing a launch.

EDIT: The following two first appeared with dates, but were changed within an hour to mid/early/late -month notation (I’m not psychic! =)

Open-source augmented reality platform

• Prediction on August 28th, 2009: Mid April, 2010 an important open source AR platform standard is introduced.

Augmented reality eyewear & head mounted displays

• Prediction on August 28th, 2009: Early May, 2010 the first specs specifically designed for mainstream, mobile AR are announced. Use of eyewear-screens (head-mounted displays, AR glasses) increasingly popular among young and young adults.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Correctly predicted: Augmented reality support in iPhone OS 3.1
2. Augmented reality on iPhone delayed, but hardly prevented

The notification came yesterday and what a delightful wake-up call. I knew there’d been about a thousand submissions last year, and that they’d had to make a delay this one due to an increase, so it was quite unexpected. (Each category is drastically different—but it still makes my head spin to be on a list with Ars Technica! Awesome.)

My thanks go out to the judges, bows to the fellow finalists and best wishes all around!

Automatic recommendations:

1. Think Artificial Twine Invitations: Round II
2. Think Artificial is Written by One Human, and One AI System [Important Site News]

By a key combination you bring up a command-line interface that let’s you write natural language instructions. For example, selecting text on page, bringing up the window and then typing “email this to xyz@something.com“. A similar example is translation; i.e. translate this to French. I’ve recently been migrating many of my desktop activities to web applications, including moving entirely from desktop email to Gmail, and a big plus for me is that Ubiquity works with Gmail right out of the box.

Here’s a recap of the initial features, as stated in the Ubiquity prototype announcement:

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism

And then there’s the introductory video for your enjoyment.

Head over to the Ubiquity page and try it out for yourself. It’s a bit buggy (it’s a prototype, after all)—but it looks like it has great potential.

No related posts.

If your comment shows up with a gray person like the third comment above, it means you’ll have to get yourself a Gravatar. If you haven’t heard of Gravatars, or Globally Recognized Avatars, they’re a service that allows you to upload and associate an avatar with your e-mail address. Since they’re in use by many popular websites, it’ll spare you some time when commenting or creating accounts there—all you’ll have to do is enter your email address and they’ll pop up automatically (email encrypted via the MD5 algorithm). For the record, the people on the pic with me above are Gnorb and Esther — both of which run great blogs.

See you around.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Think Artificial is Written by One Human, and One AI System [Important Site News]
2. Think Artificial Twine Invitations: Round II

[Subscribers - visit the post if you can't see the video]

You can view more- or create your own art with Algorithm Ink.

[via Hackzine]

No related posts.

The rules are:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
5. Present an image of martial discord from whatever period or situation you’d like.

You must excuse that I thought about what I should write due to a failure in my random-thought function. But the following are selected facts from a brainstorm.

The se7en random facts

1. Six years ago I underwent brain surgery. I had a tumor the size of a large chicken egg pushing on my cerebellum. Keen eyes can spot the tumor on the online 3D model of my brain.
2. Since I left kindergarten all friends I’ve made have been older than I am.
3. I’m an agnostic atheist. My mother fears I’ll go to hell.
4. I read Snow Crash in English when I was 10 years old. My teacher couldn’t believe I understood it and questioned me about its content. (Remember that I’m Icelandic)
5. I take pride in that last fact and sometimes mention it in vain.
6. I recently started doing Zen-flavored meditation.
7. The lovely summer of 2006, a baby raven with a crooked leg landed in my lap. I fixed his leg with braces and raised him for a year. (that’s him in the header pic). He’s living in the wild now. I miss that crazy bird dearly.

And then to name the next seven minds (in no specific order):

• Norbert Cartagena
• Nils Geylen
• John P.
• Eli James
• Josh
• Jason Ellis
• David Seah
• Aasemoon

Hat’s off to the tagged!

No related posts.

Simply leave a short comment on this post if you’re interested in giving Twine a spin. An invitation will be sent to the email address you specify in the comment’s field.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Twine Invites for Readers of Think Artificial
2. Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)

I exchanged emails with Julian Corbett, head of Business Development at Vollee, who revealed that the Mobile Second Life Client (SL) would not be limited to 3G but that Wi-Fi connectivity would also be enabled. This begged three additional questions which were courteously answered by Corbett.

In short, the following was clarified:

• iPhone’s will be supported by Vollee.
• The Mobile SL client will be Wi-Fi enabled in addition to 3G.
• The Client seen in the video (see last post) is a Java implementation.

Here are my questions to Vollee, reposted with answers from Julian Corbett and additional notes from myself.

Client Simplicity Equals Ease of Portability

1. Could you provide me with any kind of technical explanations of what your software is? Is it Java?

“On the client side (your phone) we have a rather basic player (approx 100k). All is does is display the images and captures key clicks that are sent back in a heartbeat back to our servers. All of the intelligence of our system is really on the server side. The client itself can be ported to any platform (Java, BREW, Windows mobile, Symbian…). What you see on youtube is running on a Java client (generally the most limiting of all the platforms)”

As stated before, their servers do the heavy lifting in Second Life. The client application (made possible by Linden Lab open-sourcing their client) streams the screen and sends player actions back to their servers.

Wi-Fi Support in the Works

2. With Wi-Fi connections possible, is it a requirement that the phone is 3G [enabled or that people have] a 3G contract with their carrier?

“We talk about 3G phones as – other than the iPhone (and even that will likely soon change) there are very few wi-fi enabled phones that are not also 3G. But all we need is a fast connection, so yes wi-fi works fine”

To brush off what could otherwise be considered ambiguous in the above statement, this was my original question and consequent answer:

Hrafn: “Given a phone without 3G, like the iPhone, will it not be able to utilize Wi-Fi to run the mobile SL client?”
Unknown Vollee employee: “Yes, wi-fi is also supported.”

So one might deduce that Vollee is focusing on 3G- but will include Wi-Fi connectivity.

I’m personally excited over this as I’m quite the enthusiast of mobile and wearable computing.

I’ve tried iPhone screen-streaming software to run heavy applications; VNSea and telekinesis, but I’m afraid both of these had too low screen refresh rates for interactivity with graphic-intensive applications. (To be fair this was about three months ago so the refresh rate has possibly improved).

iPhone Will Be Supported By Vollee

3. Will it technically be able to run on iPhones currently in circulation; and if not, will it be able to run on iPhones after a software update from Apple?

“iPhone will be supported by Vollee. We are still working on making sure we have an optimized experience for the device but it is coming!”

Unfortunately the company was not prepared to release any videos or photos of the software. For now all they could say was that they were working on it.

Previous news of the phone applications demonstrated at GDC’08 have been very positive with regards to controlling Second Life. While Corbett’s answer is somewhat vague, with Java on its way to the iPhone I suppose their hurry to make a port for 3G-less devices follows hand-in-hand with demand and interest. Corbett continues:

“… For this to be successful we are looking to get as many SL residents as possible interested in this service for the open beta. The more people who sign up the more handsets we will support and the more features (such as mouse interactions and transactions) will be coming. If we feel that there is a real strong demand and interest from the SL community there are a LOT more things we can do …

So people with iPhones, iPod Touch (or similar mobile Wi-Fi devices) can improve the likelihood of stand-alone Wi-Fi support by pre-registering on Vollee’s site for the beta rollout which begins in May.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Fully Capable Second Life on Mobile Phones

But it certainly looks like they’ve made significant advances judging from some test queries.

The engine is similar to Twine in that it utilizes semantic metadata to process queries and reason. But that’s about all they have in common — they use the metadata to provide very different services.

Powerset’s first product is a search and discovery experience for Wikipedia, launched in May 2008. Powerset’s technology improves the entire search process. In the search box, you can express yourself in keywords, phrases, or simple questions. On the search results page, Powerset gives more accurate results, often answering questions directly, and aggregates information from across multiple articles.
[About Powerset]

It will be exciting to see how the titans of this first wave semantic web startups will band together in the near future. Powerset and Twine both utilize Wikipedia, and Powerset uses Freebase information. If I’m not mistaken I seem to remember the CEOs of Twine and Freebase mentioning potential collaboration at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last year; and its not too hard to envision how that could be mutually beneficial.

Here are some interesting test queries and commentary. But I recommend you head over there yourself to try it out; share with us the voes and virtues. Note that these are only the ones that worked!

When did Albert Einstein die?

This one came as a nice surprise because I remembered having seen a beta bug report where “die” returned results in German pages. But this time it resulted in the nice date icon and a list of Wikipedia pages.

Who played Doctor Who?

A little play with words resulted in a nice, AJAX rich list of all the Doctors! The same list popped up when I added “… in 2004?”.

Neal Stephenson

Here’s a nice and data rich result from Freebase showing birthdate, place of birth, books published, etc.

Fractal

We can see the different types of fields and related concepts. “Complex systems” returned a similar summary but included another tab titled “Journal” that displayed information on a scientific journal with this name.

A handful of results weren’t quite as elegant, but it’s safe to say that this is a great start for Powerset.

Links & References

• Powerset’s Launchpost

Automatic recommendations:

1. Best Technology Innovation, 5 Crunchies Finalists
2. Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)

The requirements of their system is 3G phone (for rapid streaming), is less than 100k and runs on “any platform”, and their service is free — at least during the beta. Martin Dunsby, CEO of Vollee, presented at GDC’08 which resulted in reports such as the following:

“The results are stunning. A PC-perfect version of Second Life runs on a phone that could barely handle some of the most elemental mobile games. Vollee also optimizes the controls and user interface for phones, so in Second Life’s case, instead of having pop-up windows for chatting or maps, a tabulated system lets you switch between each screen. It may not have keyboard-and-mouse support, but Vollee tries to make the keypad perform most of the same functions, so moving and flying around in Second Life felt quite natural and looked great to us.
[1UP on Vollee's SL at GDC'08]”

3G Focused, Wi-Fi Enabled

Being interested in the emerging world of mobile computing, and not being an owner of a 3G phone, I dropped Vollee an email and asked whether they didn’t support Wi-Fi access, as most major cities now have Wi-Fi covering large portions of urban areas.

Their answer was yes. And this lead to even more curiosity. I expected a no because there is no mention of Wi-Fi on their pages (you’d think that’d be mentioned, right? Even if 3G is the focus). So this raised more questions that are not explicitly answered in their FAQ; specifically the following three which I’m now waiting for an answer to:

1. Could you provide me with any kind of technical explanations of what your software is? Is it Java?
2. With Wi-Fi connections possible, is it a requirement that the phone is 3G [enabled or that people have] a 3G contract with their carrier?
3. Will it technically be able to run on iPhones currently in circulation; and if not, will it be able to run on iPhones after a software update from Apple?

I’m really pushing it with that last one, I know. It’s not too far fetched that they’re collaborating with Apple, but if they were they’d hardly reveal anything. The answers, when and if I get them, will be posted here. In the meantime enjoy this video of the system in action on a Motorola phone.

No related posts.

Briefly rehashing what I said in my introductory post to Twine; this online service allows you to gather your data into one place (videos, bookmarks, photos, etc.). From around the web or from your own machine. And with more intelligence and metadata extraction/understanding which makes it easier to organize and find your information. Or discover information of interest to you as there’s a lively bunch of people (and AI) on there already recommending information.

So I’m pleased to announce that I have invitation tickets for interested readers & supporters of Think Artificial. Getting a nice productivity tool ahead of about 40,000 people waiting to get access.

How to Get an Invitation

Those that are likely to contribute to the active development and growth of both Twine (and a new extension of Think Artificial within Twine) will be more likely to receive invites. The following are the two ways to get invites.

1. Comment – 20 hand-picked readers that comment on this post will receive an invitation. Comment should indicate what it is about the service that interests you, and/or why you’d like an invite. The email you enter in the comment field is the email I’ll send an invite to.

OR

2. Write an entry – 30 hand-picked writers will receive an invitation by writing an entry on the Future of the Web in the Next 2-5 years linking back here to Think Artificial. Send me an email with a link to your article and specify an address to send the invitation to if its not the one you sent from.

I always enjoy when people think — there’s never enough of that. So in the second point, I’m (ab)using my position in recruiting the masses to spread thought-worthy issues and ideas.

In the event that I get an overwhelming amount of comments, I’m going to limit the selection to the first 60 commenters. I simply don’t have time for more. And regarding the articles, they must be new — not from your archives! And selection will be based on quality – meaning entries that are well written and present personal perspectives.

Extras

The “beta” tag on Twine is not a Perpetual Beta where the tag is slapped on as a beforehand-apology for any user discomfort. But “beta” in it’s original meaning: It’s a product in the making, incomplete, getting active user feedback and making improvements.

Here are some qualities I recommend you have to enjoy Twine:

• Online activity experience – I’m looking for people that enjoy finding and sharing data. Regular use of Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, YouTube or Blogging is a plus.
• Patience – With Twine in a beta status, lack of a feature or the disfunction of a present one can be keyboard-through-the-monitor frustrating. Patience equals suggesting improvements.
• Vision and Ideas – It’s a plus to have shown a public interest in innovative web services, and/or having publically posted original articles on how we use the web. As mentioned above, I like (getting to know) people that like to think and contemplate the future.

I see potential for Twine to bloom in bright colors. And for the Web to boom with acumen. We just need determined people to get the gears in the right places.

Final Commentary

If you’re not one of those that make the cut this time — stick around. You’ll may get another chance. I’ll continue to keep an eye out for cool people after this round ends on April 29th.

Finally, I mentioned something about a Think Artificial twine. It’s an experimental place inside Twine where like-minded people — we — can collaborate on harvesting and discussing aesthetic loaded, machine riddled and intelligent content.

Automatic recommendations:

1. Why I Migrated Over to Twine (And Other Social Services Bit the Dust)
2. Best Technology Innovation, 5 Crunchies Finalists

There are several reasons for this, some of which I’ll detail here — and end by hinting at why it’s immediately relevant despite Twine being in an invitation-only beta.

For the sake of easy digest, we’ll begin with Twine’s features presented in bullets:

1. Social bookmarking service
2. Central storage for documents, images, videos and other data (from your machine or from the web)
3. Media viewable inside Twine, bookmarked or uploaded. (videos, images, etc.)
4. Collaborative platform with wiki-like editing/built in text editor
5. User-created groups with discussion boards
6. Intelligent analysis of added content (more on this below)
7. A recommendation engine to help discover information & people relevant to you and your interests

Do note that this list is not complete, it’s just the most prominent features in the way I use Twine. As mentioned, I gradually strayed away from other online services as this provided everything in one place. One place being a very important part — I wanted my data accessible in one place instead of having to visit the diverse online services. And actively building a semantic web by using it is not a small benefit. It’s a vision and necessary addition to the web. (And to humanities toolshed).

What Twine is & Does

The Twine team recently created a new and public Twine Tour that covers the basic purpose and functions of Twine. Specific details are kept at minimum because they are under active development and change on a regular basis (Twine is in a “real” beta, see below).

The tour covers the basics and I recommend reading it in addition to this post. But here’s a look at one of the things that dazzled me from the start. The Bookmarklet.

Bookmarklet Example

If you’ve ever used an online bookmarking service you’re familiar with adding a link to your browsers toolbar, and then clicking it to bookmark the page you’re on for easy access online later. It’s the same concept here, except when you click the bookmarking link the pretty window below appears at the corner of your browser window.

The “Add to”, “Title” and “Summary” fields are shown truncated.
They auto-expand when clicked.

None of the information you see above was entered by hand. The summary contains the text specified in the article metadata generated by Wordpress, the same regarding tags & title — plus Twine generates a thumbnail of the page. (This is not all Twine does, as you’ll see as we go on).

So things are auto-extracted; with the option of adding or modifying them manually (you can manually select a pic from the page if you want). All we need to do is click save.

This has proven a major productivity boost for me, as the extra information makes it much easier to find the items again.

Extraction Varies Depending on Item Type

The extraction works on all pages — but depending on the type of the item being bookmarked, extraction is handled differently. For example, bookmarking a product on Amazon (Snow Crash, in this case) results in an item inside Twine that looks like this:

The bookmarklet extracts important data (price, author, publisher, book cover, etc.) — identifying authors as a type of “person”, the book as a “book” type, etc. This makes it easier to find, view and organize. And the same goes for YouTube videos; info is extracted and you can view the video inside Twine. Again, the benefit is that with all the information extracted it becomes much easier to find the item. I never remember my bookmarks on del.icio.us and always have to browse long lists. So this has proven a golden feature.

Additionally I find being able to view all the info inside Twine a great relief. I no longer have to collect YouTube videos in a gallery and visit them there (or direct friends there), the same with books — I can now make a list of books to read, books I’ve read, etc. and view all the information on the same site. And oh, movies from IMDb too.

Automatic Parsing of Text (the technical side of things)

The field marked summary is automatically parsed by Twine’s AI systems to identify people, places and the likes. So for example when Stanley Kubrick is mentioned in the bookmarklet fields, or in the document you upload, or in the email you send into Twine — the system will analyze and identify him as a person (not as a mere keyword). This is called entity extraction and is applied to all text on Twine.

Under the hood, a person is defined in a larger ontology in relation to other “things”. Here’s an example of a very small portion of my own graph within Twine:

Some may not find the point of this clear. So to explain: Just as HTML enables computers to display data — this extra semantic information markup (RDF, OWL, etc.) enables computers to understand what the data is they’re displaying. And moreover, to understand what things are in relation to other things.

Example Search

For an example, when we search for “Stanley Kubrick” on regular search engines, the words “Stanley” and “Kubrick” are usually regarded as mere keywords: a series of letters that the search engine then tries to find pages with those series of letters. But in the world of semantic web, the engines know “Stanley Kubrick” is a person. This results in a lot less irrelevant items from the search’s results.

Stanley Kubrick may not be the clearest example; pretend the search term is “Suzuki”: are we looking for motorcycles, or the person that created the motorcycles, Michio Suzuki?

(I Used Twine Twice While Writing this Entry)

Here are actual use cases that took place while I was writing this article.

• I had written the text below about Twine’s intelligence earlier in response to a journalist on Twine. I didn’t remember where I wrote it. To find the comment, I entered the word “Wikipedia” and specified that it should be of the type “comment”, created by “Hrafn Thórisson”. Comment found.
• I wrote in a comment on an online entry and wanted to keep it for keepsake; so I created a note for it on Twine, adding a few keywords. The process was similar to the above. Search, specify, found.

An Open, Semantic Garden (A bit more on the technicalities)

If you weren’t already aware, the systems I just described above are the basic semantic web concept: Encapsulating data in a new layer of machine processable information to help us search, find and organize the overwhelming and ever-growing sea of pictures, videos, text and whatever else we’re creating.

With every item created, uploaded or bookmarked, Twine gets dozens of bits of information ranging from automatically recognized people to products, buildings, etc. As Twine grows the potential to re-use the heaps of auto-mined data grows. Twine is learning how users work, what things mean.

And important to me is that these data structures follow standards for semantic web markup. And Twine, or its creators Radar Networks, will make the data open so that others can build applications that make use of it. I generated the graph above by accessing Twine’s data with a third party tool (RDFGravity).

As an example of further growth and intertwining with other parts of the web, I believe Twine uses machine learning & 300,000 taxonomic categories of the Wikipedia for reference. For example. Further collaboration with open semantic services are also on the radar.

With this kind of data in place we pave the road towards a more intelligent web. A web that knows that an actor is related to films and is a type of person, and that a person is a type of animal; opening up a myriad of possibilities for us to search in new and more effective ways. Hopefully a farewell to awkward search methods we use today. When Twine was unveiled, I wrote an article and put it this way:

If Twine delivers it means we’ll be getting [a site that allows us to see all our online data in one place], with intelligent frosting plus a nice warm cup of IQ Cappuccino. Not to forget that its success would make a splash in semantic web development, adding a yellow brick to the road leading away from the ever-less-productive methods of modern search and data organization.

Deus ex machina for content discovery? Not yet.

It’s not always a walk in the park. It’s a beta after all, and many things need fixing and are under construction. Many things remain undone. The auto-extraction doesn’t work well on all pages, for example. The interface needs serious tweaking and several other necessary features are still under development.

There’s More to Come

The “beta” tag is (unfortunately) often (mis)used as a pre-apology for potential user discomfort. This is not the case here. Radar Networks has stated that interface and functionality is being actively worked on (as I’ve witnessed), and that by “Beta” they mean an incomplete product.

Like I commented online on a negative review: Twine is not presented as a finished product. Not even close. It’s a product in the making; seeking active users and their feedback to help make improvements. But still, when Googling for something and becoming frustrated over messy results, I’ve caught myself on more than one occasion instinctively moving the mouse to specify item-type in the filter sidebar.

We’ve yet to see what the final, public product will look like. It’s months away (hovering somewhere around next summer). The future potential of its infrastructure and usage is immense. Considering the big picture: building up metadata is not an easy task; but the Twine system is, in my personal opinion, a great way to help it on its way. More so than any of the other alphas and betas of semantic web apps I’ve explored. But great things don’t happen overnight. As I mentioned above, this is the first wave of semantic web apps and I’m happy to support the effort via feature requests and constructive criticism. Especially because I find it useful already.

Having read the above: if you were given the chance — would you be interested in using Twine? If the answer is Yes, keep an eye on Think Artificial. If the answer is No, continue keeping an eye on Think Artificial.

Links & References

• Radar-Networks Unveils Twine
• Pourquoi J’ai Migré sur Twine (Et Comment d’Autres Services Sociaux Vont Mordre La Poussière) — Christophe G. Ducamp’s French translation of this article

Automatic recommendations:

1. Best Technology Innovation, 5 Crunchies Finalists

Read/WriteWeb, GigaOm, VentureBeat and TechCrunch are the organizers of the Crunchies; the nominees and ultimate winners are voted for online (voting has ended, we’re awaiting results). The 5 finalists in the Innovation category are (in no particular order):

• Twine – Semantic Web App
• Like – Visual shopping search engine
• Viewdle – Visual search engine for videos
• Earthmine – City/environment 3D mapping
• Move Networks – Streaming internet broadcasting

Read/WriteWeb has a very nice roundup for more information on the finalists, or there’s my older post on Twine.

Using the Twine beta

I’ve been a user in the Twine private beta for some time now and I definitely think the system has potential, and its the potential that interests me the most. At the moment it’s young and fresh (hence the beta tag); but to watch it expand is exciting, and what additional things the Twine team is brewing guarantees my attention.

So far I’ve got 160 items in there, which includes bookmarks, videos, and notes (I haven’t begun importing from Del.icio.us or others yet). I recently also started using it for taking notes in classes (One of Twine’s features are wiki-like capabilities). That was an idea I’m sure I won’t regret as it makes it easier for me to get a quick overview of all information I have on a specific topic. Plus the system itself helps me out by parsing, auto-tagging and compiling a list of all my referenced weblinks, for example.

Scoble did a video interview with Nova Spivack recently, which included a demo of Twine if you’d like to see it in action. There are two versions; one is an hour long and the other is a 10 minute compilation.

If Twine wins, we win

I’m quite happy to see Twine a finalist (their win would lend credit to a prediction of mine); not only for Twine’s sake but for the sake of semantic web technologies in general. Like I say in the comments on the Read/Write Web post, we need better ways to organize our forever increasing amount of personal information. I’m sick and tired of having my various items dispersed around the web and having to use brute force and tricks to find what I want. I want to be able to consolidate items in one place and have the computer understand better what it is I’m looking for. This is what semantic web tech could potentially provide us with.

Twine could serve as an excellent launchpad for further advances as its creators have openly stated that they intend to harbor 3rd party developers. That is, that they’ll provide proper APIs and tools to get data out of Twine, enriched with metadata so that it can be reused in other applications. Thus my subheading “if Twine wins we win” — in addition to Twine being a good product, I think the underlying technologies could offer a much broader spectrum of spin-off applications and general benefits than the others.

No related posts.