I've played around with Twine for some time and then for some reasons that I will eventually try to summarize, I've stopped paying much attention to it. I still receive the daily digests from the twines that I follow and do skim over them, but in general haven't found a real reason to do any switching over. I'm a little addicted to having the del.icio.us bookmarks on my Firefox and be able to quickly find what I'm looking for by using ctrl+b or APPLE+b and typing a keyword. Twine only offers something like that if I get to their website first.
But, anyway, as I said, I'll get to an analysis of Twine some other day. Right now I'm going to just make this observation hoping that I'll have somebody solve this for me. I was reading Kingsley Idehen's blog post about Twine and OpenLink and it referenced the ability to navigate Twine through the relationships that it adds to the pages.
It sounded interesting so I downloaded OpenLink for Firefox (which required me to create an account with Firefox Add-ons) and gave it a try... And then started the head-scratching. Lots of options that don't seem to do anything (like the relationships on the popup from the storage URI section) and things that don't seem to work until you click twice on them. But once you got used to clicking around, there is some information there. Not organized enough, in my opinion, but it's probably a good start. If you have some organization it will highlight better what isn't organized correctly.
But the question that remains for me is: is this what is missing? Should this be the next browser experience? I don't get it yet, but it might be more because of clunkiness of interface and some improvements in the data. It's a way of looking at information, but it's just not fluid enough. Not all interactions can have a real grouping that is not themselves. And if something is only grouped with itself, what is the use of grouping?
Anyway, it was an interesting experiment anyway. Now back to something more productive. Not mowing weeds (which was part of today's entertainment)...
Sunday, July 27, 2008
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1 comments:
I just noticed your post, and I would like to provide my understanding of why the OpenLink Data Explorer represents the "next" advance in the browser experience.
Historically, browsers have provided a means to present static documents. And, they can display some of the code underlying documents. OpenLink Software functions in the data access space, and we believe what is of real value to Web surfers is the data that underlies pages. And, exposure of this underlying data is not the focus of today's browsers.
I'm not yet a member of twine, but I can use another example to illustrate the power involved in exposure and subsequent manipulation of data. govtrack.com comprises data on US congress persons and bills. If you load various senators into your browser and use the Linked Data Sources feature to expose the data, you can then use the ODE search feature to run targeted queries against that specific body of data. If you were to to run a search using the term "Iraq," you'd discover that ODE is able to expose links to various newspaper articles, documentaries, and other unexpected or obscured information. This is one of the primary powers of ODE. You do not have to rely on search technologies like Google to return millions of records which are often irrelevant, ordered in an inconvenient manner, and targeting sources in which you have no interest. Someone like Kingsley who possesses an extensive list of bookmarks and utilizes social networking in specific areas of expertise can have a completely different and empowering Web experience by leveraging all that data in ways that were not heretofore possible with traditional browsers.
Finally, OpenLink is ironing out the kinks so to speak with the double clicks and so on. I urge you to check back for updates and the demos that we will be expanding up.
Netrista Khatam
Technical Services Manager
OpenLink Product Support
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