My friends at Twine are releasing a new version of their Semantic based bookmarking service today. When last I spoke about Twine, I compared it to Delicious — the difference is, unlike Delicious (which I love conceptually), I use Twine more than once every six months.

My problem with most bookmarking services is that tend to be poorly organized — relying on tags and other ad hoc taxonomies that fall apart under the rigors of complex concepts. Twine is all about concepts (all that semantic stuff they talk about) and uses a combination of groups and full text parsing of links to extract the meta-information from the actual content. In short, if I submit a post on “pushing your product in Indonesia,” Twine will not only extract the context (marketing) but will also extract that this link is location-based (Indonesia).

Another thing that I love about Twine is that the community they have attracted is deeply interested in the subjects that they submit links about. All the comments I have ever received on Twine have been well thought out, highly informative and without that glaze of snark that marks other networks.

So what’s new?

First they fixed my biggest complaint, speed. There is a lot going on server-side on Twine and the result was that it was slow to the point of being almost unusable. They have substantially improved load times and I can tell you that it’s strikingly better than it has ever been.

They also updated the UI to make it easier to find what you’re looking for and to navigate the sometimes confusing swirl of menus.

Most noticeable to active Twine users will be the revamped interest feed. It has expanded beyond simply recommending stories to become a true hub, taking into account the people you follow, the stories that you recommend and the twines that you join to feed you more news that you might like.

Did I mention they are now public?

That’s right, private BETA is over and the flood gates are open.

Overall, they have taken the feedback from the community and redesigned their product to fit into it. Not only that, they have also taken a cue from the economy and done some soul searching to find a business model. The details aren’t entirely clear, but the hint is that if you have a world of semantic data collected around a person — wouldn’t it be easy to target advertising that fits their interests? Expect some kind of interest-targeted ad play in the future.

I don’t recommend too many products, but I will say that Twine is one that I always go back to. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re are looking for a different breed of bookmarking community, it’s definitely worth a look.

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