I use a lot of bookmarking services. I only like a few of them. My big problem with most bookmarking applications is that they lack context.

Most have tagging or grouping or some other vaguely relevant sorting mechanism, but none of these methods gives me a good reason to explore anything past the “Most Popular List.”

Twine

Mixx partially solved this by making groupings more granular, but despite the fact that I love the service, it still leaves me feeling like I am missing the good stuff, worse yet, it doesn’t drive me towards wanting to find it.

Enter Twine, a semantic bookmarking service that is currently in closed BETA.

If you peel away all the Semantic Web stuff, what you end up with is a fantastically well put together social bookmarking site.

The basic unit in your work-flow are user created Twines. These are basically communities around a topic. The breath of topics available at this stage is stunning. You can find everything from really generic groups like “Cool” (A community for cool links) to extraordinarily niche communities like Buddhist Technologists. From within a Twine you can submit bookmarks, videos, notes, comments and everything else we’ve come to expect from a bookmarking site.

As a user, the best part of this experience is the way they organize your Twine subscriptions. It allows you to generate your own news feed, based on the Twines you subscribe to. By putting your favorite Twines into your digest you can quickly see what’s happening across your groups of interest, without having to go through the pain of checking each Twine manually.

The only downside I’ve seen so far is that the pages render slowly. It’s still a BETA product so you have to accept a hiccup here or there, but for a product like this that would make such a fantastic “front page,” it’s frustrating to have to wait 5-6 seconds for every page load.

If you’re interested in trying Twine out, I still have a few invites left. Leave a comment here and I’ll give them away until I run out.

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