a while ago i read this article on wired about twine, a new social bookmarking app. it was supposed to revolutionize the concept of social bookmarking, pushing links that you might be interested in into your email box. manage my digital life by feeding me interesting stuff? sure! sign me up!
at the time it was (and is still) in beta, which meant you had to wait for an invite. so i did. finally it came. and it was a joyous day.
the way twine works is you feed it links. other people feed it links. supposedly it matches your links with their links and figures out what you like. sounds brilliant! all i need to do is tell it everything i like!
trouble is, there’s already a big social bookmarking app that i use pretty extensively, del.icio.us, and to date there’s no way to import the hundreds of del.icio.us pages i’ve bookmarked into twine. what’s more, in order to get any kind of updates or interesting links sent, you need to be subscribed to a particular twine, sort of like a user group on a focussed topic. by default it subscribes you to the beta feedback twine — so you get daily emails about not-so-interesting development suggestions and whining about why this feature doesn’t work or that feature isn’t included yet. i managed to join the wordpress twine, and i did get a couple good links out of it. but the whole thing is just way too much work. i have to find the things that i think will be interesting to get the links that you think that i think will be interesting??
where’s the social bookmarking application that works like last.fm, where all i need to do is feed it my links and i get suggestions the way last.fm suggests artists i might be interested in based on the music i listen to? so, twine, you were an interesting idea, but you’re way too broken, i’m gonna have to break up with you.
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