New Twine interface lets users visualize shared bookmarks

July 2, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

twine-visualizationSocial bookmarking service Twine attracted a lot of attention as an early poster boy for semantic technology, which it uses to help serve you links customized to your interests. But in addition to delivering smarter bookmarks, Twine just unveiled a better interface for exploring that content.

Rather than showing you the normal list of bookmarks that you see on Twine and other content-sharing sites like Digg, the service now offers a “visualization” option, which allows you to scroll through one headline at a time (see the video below), at a speed that’s much faster than scrolling up-and-down the page. Some have compared the interface to Cover Flow, the iTunes interface that lets you scroll through album and movie covers, though it also reminded me of Cooliris, which lets you scroll through a 3D wall to explore different media, including news articles. Twine’s visualization is more stripped-down than Cooliris’, showing only one article at a time — but that approach may work better for Twine, since it’s emphasizing text (specifically titles and headlines) rather than images or videos.

The service was developed by a San Francisco company called Radar Networks, which had raised a total of $18 million from Velocity Interactive Group, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Leapfrog Ventures, and Vulcan Capital. When we last covered Twine, it seemed to be growing “explosively”. Traffic continued to rise for several months, according to data from Compete, but finally started to level off in May at just under 2 million monthly unique visitors.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • OK I am gonna install that for my users now. Cool article.
  • Sweet, interested to hear how it turns out.
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