<h2><font size="2"><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Siliconbeat/%7E3/171898687/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">Radar's Twine: A semantic Google killer?</a></font></h2><div>
<span>from <a href="http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http%3A%2F%2Fventurebeat.com%2F%3Ffeed%3Drss" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">VentureBeat</a></span> by Chris Morrison
</div><p><img src="http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/twine-logo.jpg" alt="twine-logo.jpg">More than a year of secrecy spawned rumors about <a href="http://www.radarnetworks.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
Radar Networks
</a>. The most popular: It's a "Google killer." Tomorrow morning, Radar will surprise a few people by launching <a href="http://www.twine.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
Twine</a>, a tool for collecting and organizing information that's very different from Google. But it's potentially just as ambitious.
</p>
<p>An example of how <a href="http://www.twine.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">Twine</a>
works: A user uploads a text document to their Twine account. Twine
then parses the document to find the words with meaning — names,
places, concepts and so forth. Those terms become tags, which the
person can use to access related information.</p>
<p>Twine's underlying technology gives the computer a measure of
intelligence. Using tags, a computer can distinguish between, say, a
reference to the kind of bird that flies and the kind that flips people
off. Once it has, it can give users a wealth of other information,
drawn from their own accumulated knowledge base, other users and the
outside internet. Where Google crawls the entire web and ultimately
pollutes your search results with different kinds of "birds," Radar
picks from a smaller universe of sources and tries to automatically
discard the ones you don't want.</p>
<p>That could help a marketer collect all the information about a
particular product, or a group of analysts to aggregate information on
a subject. The "documents" gathered will include, among many others,
text, PDFs, or even videos on YouTube (Twine simply draws on
pre-existing tags and description of visual media to do its tagging
work).</p>
<p>The information that helps Twine make decisions on its own about
what content to pull in for you comes both from a users' accumulated
information as well as their actions, which means that, as the user
pulls more info into their account on their own, Twine will begin to
work cooperatively, providing more content where it's needed and even
assisting groups or teams of people with collaborative research and
knowledge-building.</p>
<p>Young companies with a limited ability to do similar selection
tricks — for instance, Jiglu, which we posted about a few days ago —
are increasingly common, and tend to obscure the companies that truly
have a chance of becoming market leaders. That's too bad, because
there's no question that intelligent computer handling of data — a
first step toward artificial intelligence — will be an important part
of the internet in coming years.</p>
<p>Helping Radar is the breadth of its underlying technology and the
strong scientific and engineering team, now 30 strong, that has been
working on the platform for years.</p>
<p>Radar does, however, have competitors. The winning bet will boil
down to which company will be able to throw enough scientific
brilliance at the difficult problem of teaching computers to understand
human information. The winner will likely dominate, as Google does with
search.</p>
<p>To explain the differences between these competing startups, it's
easiest to separate them by the particular types of technology they
utilize.</p>
<p>Broadly speaking, those technologies fall into three categories. The
first is statistical analysis, in which Google reigns supreme. Terms
are examined for their frequency, placement and outside links to
determine their apparent relevancy, and then ranked. Google's
algorithms have gotten better over the years, and it has incrementally
added on other technologies and services.</p>
<p>Natural language search is the second category. Teaching computers
to understand human language is a complex process which involves
breaking sentences down to their component parts — nouns, verbs,
adjectives and so forth — which can then take on symbolic meaning for
computers. Powerset (previous coverage), which is dribbling out its
technology in stages, is a prime example of this approach.</p>
<p>The third, semantic search, is much-hyped, but little understood.
Simply put, people attach markers to human-generated content, whether a
paragraph of text or a picture, to outright tell computers in a special
machine language what's meaningful. In these databases of these
companies, for example, I might be identified as "Chris Morrison," with
the markers "writer," "venturebeat," "male," "technology," "charming"
and "goodlooking." (All true, of course.) If applied to the entire
internet, the result could be thought of as a giant, interrelated
Wikipedia. Metaweb, which recently launched Freebase, is attempting to
create just that.</p>
<p>For the most part, each company is betting on its own core
technology to win the race. Radar hopes its own special combination of
all three will take the day — much like another secretive startup,
Franz Inc.</p>
<p>To be fair, there's also a fourth, less glamorous approach which
relies almost entirely on humans. ChaCha and a forthcoming startup from
Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are two examples.</p>
<p>First, though, the viability of any technology must be proven. To
return to Twine, it's the horse Radar is betting on, just as Powerset
hopes to take the approach of slowly beating out Google at searching
the internet.</p>
<p>What matters is how well Twine can perform at helping humans
organize the avalanche of information that is modern life. So while
there are other features we could mention, from adding content through
an innovative bookmarklet to finding related content through a "social
graph" of similar users, it's more useful to give our reaction to Twine.</p>
<p>Having sat through a demo by founder Nova Spivack, we can say that
we're excited to try out Twine. The interface is simple, yet powerful.
While the use of tagging resembles tag-lists that have been around for
years, their application is clearly more useful. And Twine was
obviously capable of completing some complex tasks, like distinguishing
the person's name J.P. Morgan from the company with the same name.</p>
<p>The site is just as obviously still in development. A wealth of
other features could obviously be useful, from a more full array of
choices for communicating with other users (Spivack says instant
messaging is coming) to adding more possibilities for linking
information.</p>
<p>However, the Twine team won't have to do the work alone. Sometime
after the current beta launch, which will be limited to a few thousand
people, Twine plans on opening up several APIs to allow outside
developers to work with the platform.</p>
<p>For now, the site is geared toward people who use the internet
heavily — primarily knowledge professionals, like the marketers and
analysts mentioned above. Students, prosumers (people with a strong
interest in a particular thing) and companies will also likely find
uses for Twine.</p>
<p>For more discussion of Radar's idea of the future — including what
could go wrong — we'll post a Q&A with Nova Spivack on Saturday</p>
<p><img src="http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/twine-greentech.jpg" alt="twine-greentech.jpg"></p>
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