Chris Herbert's List: The Knowlege Worker and using Diigo

• I just stumbled upon diigo, which follows the footsteps of del.icio.us but takes it up a notch. All I was looking, was for a way to highlight content on the web.

  • That's exactly what I was looking for too.
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• Besides being able to bookmark a page, I wanted to be able to permanently highlight something on the page.

• If that's the case, it will probably be too soon. Twine has some major shortcomings that I think are going to drastically hinder the service's adoption. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those shortcomings come down to usability and performance. Hopefully these problems will be resolved, but it isn't going to be easy.
• Semantic technology seems very likely to be key to the future of the web, but Twine demonstrates just how hard it's going to be for that technology to operate close to the surface of the user interface.
• Twine looks at content and parses it automatically for the names of people, places, organizations and other subject tags. Users are then able to navigate between related content, view recommended content and connect with recommended people with related interests.
• The semantic analysis is faster and smarter than full text search. Making content online machine readable cuts time and thought out of discovery of related information, letting users focus on higher levels of engagement. It's a great idea and I hope Twine can overcome the issues I'm seeing with it.
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• Problem: It Doesn't Work Very Well

    

  The biggest problem with Twine right now may be that it doesn't work as well as it should. It doesn't consistently grab summary text or tags for pages you save in Twine, it doesn't recognize article authors as relevant people and it often captures summary information about the domain you're on instead of a particular page's content.

    

  Twine founder Nova Spivack saw that I was saving pages that weren't coming in with summary information and commented on one of my items that the page at issue was irregularly formatted. That's why Twine wasn't able to analyze it, he said. That is a major problem; most of the web is made up of ugly, non-standard pages. Fundamental to the value proposition of a top-down semantic analysis tool should be the ability to discover meaning from unstructured data. Many of the other problems Twine faces will be challenging but do seem solvable. This one could be a deal breaker.

    

  Serious researchers will also be frustrated with the lack of support for authenticated (password protected) pages and the absence of RSS feeds -though feeds may come as soon as the app is public.

• Problem: It's Poorly Organized

    

  Twine has bitten off a whole lot to chew on. It's an impressive service for the most part. Unfortunately, full-featured social bookmarking is information-dense enough that adding all the semantic features and recommendations from Twine turns information architecture and User Experience into huge challenges.

    

  Twine's user experience is confusing. It's hard to keep track of all the levels and types of information available, site navigation is dizzying and my use of the service happened in spite of the interface.
• There are a variety of different approaches already explored in the social bookmarking market. Del.icio.us is simple and does what it says it does, nothing more nothing less. Ma.gnolia does a little bit more, looks great and is relatively self-explanatory. Furl.net was probably better technology than either Del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia but the user experience makes you want to punch some one and the service has withered accordingly. Twine needs to blow this category out of the water but it doesn't.

6 more annotations...

• • Lists can be good containers for specific projects. When does one use a group instead of a list I wonder.
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• But after downloading a Diigo update this morning, I realized I'm just scratching the surface of what you can do with Diigo. For example, my previous blog post on Greenspan's sudden epiphany...well, I posted it direct from Diigo while reading and bookmarking the article. Pretty cool, huh?

• Test - Chris Herbert on 2008-10-25