Tying It Together With Twine: Semantic Search

About a year ago, there was some chatter about Web 3.0 coming soon. We all know what Web 2.0 unfolded: a vast strength of websites built around social networking. Top sites have included www.YouTube.com (purchased by Google in 2006 for $1.65 Billion) and that one transaction, alone, put Social Networking on the map as serious business. But www.YouTube.com isn't the only success in Social Networking. Career Networking has been big with Ryze, LinkedIn.com, and ecademy.com. Music and personal networks have thrived with GarageBand.com and MySpace.com. It is to the point where if you're a band and you DON'T have a MySpace or GarageBand profile, you're not even on the map. Other social networks have popped up like Zaadz, Ojeez, Facebook, and more.

So, what is Web 3.0? Early indicators point to the idea of taking all of this information we search for, and putting a savvy AI (artificial intelligence) engine behind it so that our search results or social networks get ramped up on steroids. For example, rather than just telling you "what's popular now" on your home page when you log in to your network at My Space, the 3.0 version present "here's what YOU would find popular now, based upon YOUR tastes and interests." Cool, huh?

What's really great about 3.0 search, though, is the promise of future advertising spots. See, the web is driven by advertising. Many of the blogs out there making money aren't making ANY money by selling product or even offering e-books. They're just WRITING. And they WRITE a LOT. One blogger I know experienced a traffic surge from zero to millions within two years by simply writing intelligent articles every 1.2 days. He wrote over 300 article posts within the first year, alone. However, a QUALITY article post is worth more than FREQUENT posts, according to this blogger. My experience is that QUALITY is more important than quantity; however, without writing a lot or posting a lot it is hard to tell which articles will be "hits" without more material.

Advertisers love blogs and content rich websites. Why? Because they are targeted to specific content and ideas: All about auto-sports racing might be one blog idea, whereas another blog is all about gadgets. If you can then target your demographic, you have better advertising than a general ad posting to a general site.

Web 3.0 makes this more of a reality.

And, apparently, it's here.

On October 19, 2007, Radar Networks announced Twine™, a revolutionary new service that helps you share, organize, and find information.

Radar Networks, led by Web visionary Nova Spivack (who co-founded EarthWeb and Dice.com), is pioneering the Semantic Web (sometimes referred to as Web 3.0) with a new platform for the next-generation of Web applications.

The first application released on this platform is Twine, a new service for sharing, organizing and finding information with people you trust. Use Twine to better leverage and contribute to the collective intelligence of your friends, colleagues, groups and teams. Twine ties it all together.

The idea behind the SEMANTIC WEB is to provide a way to search data beyond the first string. I consider it more of a search concierge with stronger hooks to what I want. I've developed a model and working on more tools of this nature for organization empowerment (contact me if you're curious), so you know I consider it useful.

You can view some screenshots of the intial Beta from TWINE where TWINE is reviewed.

I just reviewed the description for the initial version of this platform and have to say it looks promising. I'll be reporting more on Web 3.0 in the near future after more beta-testing.

Post by Scott Andrews, CEO of ARRiiVE Business Solutions.


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